CHRIS Collins can’t nail down one reason why he scored 35 goals in Clonakilty Soccer Club’s double-winning season.
There’s an irony that the man nicknamed Flash is slow to take too much credit, but he feels it was a combination of different factors: luck, a new position and the quality of his team-mates. He didn’t mention that he has an eye for goal, but his stats at the end of a trophy-laden 2023/24 campaign speak for themselves.
‘Scoring 35 goals in all competitions was mad because I usually only score five or six goals!’ Collins (26) laughs.
‘When Lorne (Edmeade) came in with Mousey (Clonakilty manager John Leahy), they pushed me further forward, gave me more of a free role instead of playing a bit deeper – it meant that I was able to get on the end of things.
‘As the games went on I had ten goals, then 15, and I was sure it was about to dry up soon, but it didn’t. It was amazing. The quality of the balls from the lads was a great help. There was a bit of luck too.’
Collins’ dream season was one of the reasons the Clonakilty club won the two big prizes in the West Cork League in 2024 – Leahy’s legends won the Beamish Cup title for the first time since Clon’s last success in 2008, and then they won the Premier Division crown for the first time ever. The greatest season in Clon soccer history.
‘I started playing soccer with Clon when I was five or six years old,’ Collins explains, with his sporting passion more with soccer than GAA in the sports-mad town.
‘I joined the junior team when I was under-16, that year we won the double in U18. The year after we won the U18 league title. At junior level, apart from this year all I had picked up was two or three Premier Cups and a few Parkway Cups, but there were so many near misses. We lost three Beamish Cup finals in a row and had finished second in the Premier to Drinagh Rangers before as well.
‘I’ve always loved it. When you’re with a good bunch of lads and having fun, you don't mind going out playing on a Sunday morning in the wind and the rain, but it makes life a lot easier when you’re winning.’
Clonakilty Soccer Club's Conor McKahey and Chris Collins celebrate winning the Premier Division title.
This Clonakilty team won a lot in their remarkable 2023/24 campaign. In their Premier title-winning charge, they won 15 out of 18 league games, losing only once, to title rivals Drinagh Rangers. Their rivalry with Drinagh was one of the talking points of the season – the two best teams met in both the Beamish Cup final and the final-day Premier Division title decider. Collins had the Beamish Cup in his sights at the start of the campaign. That’s the one he wanted. When Clonakilty AFC won the cup title last back in 2008, a ten-year-old Chris Collins was in the team photo that appeared in The Southern Star. He saw what it meant to win the Beamish Cup, and he wanted to achieve it.
‘I used to go to all their matches and I am actually in the winning photo,’ he says, and he has another connection with that team – it was the 2008 cup-winning Clonakilty captain Martin White who called Collins ‘Flash’ for the first time. And the nickname stuck. Legend has it that White asked Collins to call him Flash, and then turned it back on Collins when he started playing junior soccer. It fits, as Collins has a turn of speed like super hero The Flash.
Back to the quest for Beamish Cup glory. Collins and his Clon team-mates had lost the cup finals in 2020, ’21 and ’22, and they stung, so this is a trophy they all wanted. The cup run was tricky. Collins netted a last-gasp winner in the 2-1 opening round derby win against Clonakilty United. Next Clon beat Drinagh Rangers on penalties after a 1-1 draw. Collins was on target again in the 2-1 quarter-final extra-time win against Lyre Rovers. Then they had the dramatic 3-2 extra-time semi-final triumph against Castletown Celtic – Collins scored a trademark free with minutes left in extra time, his second goal of the game and one of his favourite of the 35 he scored. It set up a final showdown with Drinagh on May 5th in Lyre. Again, Collins grabbed the headlines.
Clon raced into a 2-0 lead, Collins on target with a penalty after Conor McKahey opened the scoring. Back came Drinagh, as goals from Barry O’Driscoll (H) and Robbie McQueen leveled the game, 2-2. With 15 minutes left, we had another bend-it-like-Chris moment, as he wrapped his foot around a free to score an incredible cup-final winner. 3-2. Clon’s wait for Beamish Cup glory was over.
‘That was a huge win because Drinagh had something over us. I have been playing for ten or 11 years, but I had only beaten them once before that and that was in my first junior game playing soccer,’ Collins explains.
‘The Beamish Cup final was the second time and it gave us the edge to know what we can do. We had the players to match them, compared to other seasons. We had a lot of young lads come in to freshen things up; we have over 20 lads at training every week and that makes a big difference. It meant we could do 11-a-side matches in training, work on set-pieces, do whatever we needed to do.
‘It meant too that if a fella was missing or injured, then the next fella was just as good as him; we had trust in the bench that they would come on and make a difference.’
Chris Collins celebrates his Beamish Cup final-winning goal.
The cup final also injected belief into Clonakilty that they could hold on in their Premier Division title run-in, as Drinagh Rangers played catch-up with games in hand. It all came down to a home game in Darrara on June 2nd, when a Jonathan Leahy double earned Clon a 2-2 draw in the title decider with Drinagh, and clinched the Premier title by two points. Clon won the marathon, and the best team that season added the league to their cup success.
‘If this was other years I don’t know whether we could have done it,’ Collins says, but there was a belief in the team that was different to previous seasons. He pinpoints an early league game away to Beara.
‘We went 1-0 down, and then 2-1 down, and I think we scored three goals in the last 30 minutes, that’s something that we wouldn’t normally do. I felt we were on to something then.’
Collins scored a double in that 4-2 win against Beara, his two goals in three second-half minutes turning a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 lead, before Reuben Henry sealed the victory. There was steel to Clon that had been missing. Add in the strength in depth. And the momentum they created, and they couldn’t be stopped. Great times. Huge celebrations. The challenge now is to do it all again.
