Now or never for Monivea

Date Published: 20-Mar-2008

FOR the fifth year running, Connacht’s top junior rugby club, Monivea RFC go in search of their holy grail — a place in the All-Ireland League. After multiple near misses and heartbreaks in the playoffs, captain Kevin Higgins insists the Galway club must seize their opportunity this time round.

Although just turned 28 on Wednesday, Higgins is one of the elder statesmen of the current Monivea side, an outfit who have all but dominated junior league rugby in the province over the last five years.

Indeed, with five J1 Leagues to his name — along with a Cawley Cup — Higgins has more feathers in his cap than an old Sioux Indian. Yet, those honours are not enough. Not near enough. Not for Higgins. Not for the tribesmen from Monivea.

For now, Monivea want to move to the next level, into the AIL League (Division 3), and this can only be achieved by accounting for the respective provincial champions of Ulster, Munster and Leinster over the coming month.

“This will be our fifth play-off,” begins Higgins, who hails from the well-known Athenry hurling family. “In the play-offs last year, two out of the three teams won two games and we lost out on bonus points.

“It was the Armagh game that cost us. We were asleep for the first 20 minutes and they ran in 10 points, and they beat us by 10 points. We should still have probably won the game towards the end, but ‘them are the breaks’ as they say.”

For Higgins and Monivea, it was………………..