Brilliance brings relief

Joe Kernan seems to grow further in stature with each Crossmaglen victory. Under the Croke Park stand yesterday, the manager towered above a horde of reporters as he revealed his mixture of satisfaction and relief.

"I am relieved," he says. "We wanted to play well in Croke Park today and in fairness to Na Fianna, I think some of our football in the first half was just brilliant.

"They never sat back but we have a great bunch of lads who just don't want to lose. The first half saw some lovely passing and even though we gave the ball away a little in the second half and were punished a little, I think all the boys showed tremendous appetite. "The lads showed a lot of character and this is a story that will go on and on. Who knows where this will end but from tomorrow we're the team to beat."

In contrast, Paul Caffrey, a hugely disappointed Na Fianna manager, can only stand back and wonder. "They were just marvellous," he says. "We were slow out of the blocks and I think we did very well to claw back at the end of the first half. "And we said at half-time that we couldn't be any way proud of our first-half performance and we went out to try and win the second half. But we just couldn't make it happen. All week long I never envisaged I'd be in a losing dressing-room but you've got to take your hat off to Crossmaglen. They talked a big show all week and proved it on the big occasion.

"They're a huge, big physical team in the right sense of the word. I'm blown away by how good they were. At times it was like trying to hold back an avalanche. No excuses, we just couldn't measure up. When we attacked, we looked dangerous, but we just couldn't attack often enough."

And already Crossmaglen captain Anthony Cunningham is thinking about the three-in-a-row. "We're a young team and there'll be no stopping us coming back to HQ for a few years yet," he says.

"We've no doubts in our ability. We showed it in the semi-final and showed it in stages today. We wanted to set out our stall early on and I think we steamrolled them in the first 10 minutes. We were knocked off our feet at some stages but we proved that the first 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes are big periods for us and that's what did it in the end."