Captaining your club to county success at any level is something to which all good club footballers aspire, and this Sunday Johnny Duane (St James ) and Adrian Molloy (Corofin ) will hope to be hoisting the county u-21 cup at around 5.30pm.
Duane is well known to football aficionados in the county as he played a star role in last year’s All-Ireland u-21 success with Galway from centre-back and lined out against Mayo in the senior championship last summer too.
He is a student at GMIT and is looking forward to the tussle this Sunday.
“It should be a good game and both sides have some top-quality footballers in their ranks. We beat Corofin a few years ago in the county minor final and hopefully we can replicate that result.
“We have been training since around last November for this competition and both Terry [O’Regan] and Seamus [Burke] have done a lot of work with the squad. Corofin are a top side and we will have to be at our best to beat them. We are really looking forward to the game and it should be a close contest.”
Corofin’s Adrian Molloy will line out at centre-forward on Sunday and he is cautiously optimistic.
“We have lost a few players to Australia over the past year or two and one of our best players, Kieran Cunningham, is unavailable too, so we will be up against it on Sunday. St James had a good win over Salthill in their semi-final and we will have to improve on how we played against Caltra if we are to win.”
Molloy, who turned 21 in March, is a past pupil of St Pat’s CBS in Tuam, and he now works in Medtronic. He believes the central diamond area will be crucial this weekend.
“We have a good midfield and so have they, so whichever team does well around the middle will be hard stopped. We will need everything to go well for us on the day and we will have to be clinical up front. Everyone loves playing in county finals and we will give it our best shot on Sunday.”
