Forgotten men get to prove a lot of people wrong

FAI Cup Final: It wasn't his first post-match interview, but as Vinny Perth took another detour from his short walk to the Longford dressing-room after yesterday's cup success at Lansdowne Road the club's long-serving midfielder was still finding it more difficult than most to take on board all that had just been achieved.

Asked to explain what the win meant to him, he initially shrugged and made it obvious the task was something with which he was struggling. "I've just been asked the same question out there and I burst into tears," he said as the emotion threatened to overwhelm once again. "I played my first game for this club in front of 50 people, and in that game we're just after winning a cup in front of thousands. Words can't describe it.

"People will be sick of me saying it, but there was nothing but a field when I joined six years ago and now we have a seven-and-a-half-thousand-seat stadium. We've done so much and we've got to keep aiming higher, to bring it on to the next level. But I'm so proud of what we've done here today and the way we did it too. We were so solid that I don't even think our goalkeeper had a save to make."

Barely a man in this team doesn't have a story to tell of how he was undervalued elsewhere and came to Longford having been promised the chance to prove somebody somewhere wrong, and as he clutched his man of the match award Brian McGovern must have thought of the many difficult days he endured as a youngster in England.

"There's a lot of lads here who've come back to play in the league here, and to win this, to be playing next season in Europe, means a lot to us. The league cup was a disappointment, but this is the big cup and it's fantastic to have won it like that."

Sean Francis admitted that the win felt that much sweeter after last year's frustration when he played just a few minutes as Shamrock Rovers were beaten by Derry at this stage of the competition.

"That day was instrumental in persuading me to move on and people asked whether I was doing the right thing, because Longford is supposedly a smaller club. But look at us now."

It was a theme picked up by team manager Alan Matthews a little later. "This shows people that there is life outside of the big four," he observed. "I'm delighted for the lads because they deserved it today for the way they played, but a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to get us to this stage.

"And the support has been incredible, Longford this week was like a town preparing for an All-Ireland final. In all sorts of ways the club has come a long way, you certainly never could have foreseen this when I was playing for it up at Abbeycarton. But the aim now has to be to keep on progressing. We'll celebrate tonight and then look at how to take the next step."