Kilmacabea manager Donie O’Donovan admitted his team ‘needed’ success on Saturday night after the disappointment of losing last year’s final.
‘This was totally about lifting the Mick McCarthy Cup here tonight, the county has never been mentioned,’ he said. ‘From the very start of the season, the focus was completely on the Mick McCarthy. The county is a new championship, and we’d love to do well in it but this was all about Mathúna’s and tonight. The club needed this after last year and maybe this is where we are now, we’re not going to be crying at Christmas if we don’t lift the county cup. We might be upset but we have our hands on the Mick McCarthy and that’s what tonight was all about.
‘We blended very well as a team tonight, no heads down after a bad start. Everybody stuck at it, it was hard won. Ian and Marty had mighty games, Colin McCarthy kicked some massive points and Diarmuid driving from the back, a mighty captain. But we weren’t putting the game out of reach, so there was no relaxing.
‘I won’t say we put a lot of work into this, it’s not work because we love it and enjoy it. It’s time, a lot of time. I loved being a player, this is different, a different kind of satisfaction when you win,
‘We’re in the county now, you have to be in it to win it. I think Douglas beat Nemo today. It might be their second team but they have a huge population, 30,000 as against our seven or eight hundred, so they’re going to be very strong. We’d love to win a county but to be where we are, champions of West Cork, being boxed in as we are with big senior clubs, is fantastic.’
