Touch of revenge in the air for Cork’s Séan Maguire

Seán Maguire has, he maintains, no point to prove in this weekend’s FAI Cup final but it does not take long for the hurt he felt when he was left out of Dundalk’s match-day for the same game 12 months ago to become apparent.

The 22 year-old striker spent just a few months on the books at Oriel Park where he struggled to break into a side that was thriving. That much, he says, he accepts without any real rancour. Not to even make the bench for final against Cork knocked him back and left him “devastated” though and he credits John Caulfield with helping him to get his career back on track after the various setbacks that had followed his early success with Waterford and the move to West Ham that followed.

London, he says, did not work out but he gave it his best shot and has no regrets. Sam Allardyce signed him and the Kilkennyman remains grateful for the opportunity he was given even if, like countless other youngsters in a world that is very much sink or swim, he gradually came to realisethat he was one of the ones in danger of slipping under.

“I was playing reserve team football but there were a lot of strikers,” he recalls. Elliot Lee who is at Barnsley now, Paul McCallum’s at Leyton Orient… there were a lot of strikers around my age all pushing to be with the first team but even when got there you were still fourth or fifth choice striker.

“Modibu Maiga, Andy Carrolll and Carlton Cole were the main strikers at the time and it was quite hard because West Ham is a big club, with a lot of players, a lot of players and I didn’t really push on from there and so pretty quickly it becomes a matter of getting out on loan, hopefully doing well but even at that you’re looking for a bit of luck.”

He did the loan thing with mixed results but West Ham moved on in the meantime and so, ultimately, did he.

At Dundalk, he was joining a side that was already well on its way to a second straight title. Midfielder, Richie Towell was the leading scorer but up front, David McMillan and Ciaran Kilduff were chipping in too and Stephen Kenny preferred, understandably enough, to stick with a winning side.

He has, he acknowledges, few complaints in the circumstances although when he did get to start a game, it was out on the left, he recalls, and being played out of position when he so desperately wanted to show his potential up front only added to his frustration. Dundalk were unlikely to keep him but Maguire would hardly have stayed after being passed over for the cup final and, conscious that he needed a break, he was grateful when Caulfield came calling.

“John came in and said: ‘we’ll give you the opportunity, it’ll just be for you to go and take it,’ and I haven’t really looked back. I have to give him credit; he took a chance on taking me here; I hadn’t done a lot at Dundalk but I worked hard around Christmas and thought: ‘Right, I’m going to give this a right good go,’ and it’s been a great season for me. At the start of the season if you had told me I’d have 28 goals in all competitions, be named Young Player of the Year and finish up as top goalscorer, well…. I couldn’t really have asked for more than that.” He has also made a bit of an impact with the Irish under-21s.

It has been good time on the personal front too. Though he is happy enough to accept the life that comes with professional football, being away from home and living with others who are in the same boat, he is within fairly easy driving distance of his parents Paddy and Elaine. His dad travels to almost all his games; “he’s a proud father,” says Seán, his own pride shining through. His mum, meanwhile, badgers him to come home to Clogh more often but there is a girlfriend, Claudia Rose, to distract him now and so the draw is not quite as strong now as it used to be. “I’m with her since I’ve been with Cork,” he says, “and I’m not going to lie; she has helped me a lot since I’ve been here.”

He is in good shape then heading into the cup final but reluctant to look beyond it despite being out of contract as soon as it is over. Caulfield, predictably, has made it clear he wants him to stay: “John wants the majority of us to stay,” he says, “because he’s building a team.”

One ultimately capable of winning the league every on at City hopes and though Maguire clearly has one eye on a move back to England at some point in the future he insists that he is happy in Cork and excited by the prospect of playing a part in the club’s future.

First up, though, is Dundalk and this weekend’s game at the Aviva. He was, he says, devastated, like everyone else, by the loss of the league to their rivals though he points to a midseason slump in form rather than the recent defeat at Oriel as being where the league was lost and highlights the fact that City won three of the four games between the sides this season with the young striker generally making a very positive impact on those encounters.

People will inevitably, he says, see Sunday as “Maguire’s chance for revenge,” but he views it more as an opportunity for collective “redemption”.

“It can still end up being a great year; on a personal level and as a team. I think we owe that to the supporters.”