St Mark’s hurlers secure promotion

St Marks GAA have secured promotion out of the Dublin Junior A Hurling Championship group stage following a draw with Lucan Sarsfields at 12th Lock last weekend.

The match finished with a 1-15 to 1-15 scoreline.

Robbie Glynn, manager of St Marks spoke on the achievement.

“Our main goal for the championship was to make sure we got through the groups as soon as possible.

‘Because of other results in the group mathematically we are going to go through with two games to spare which is very positive.

‘There can be negatives in that we don’t want to take our eye off the ball.

‘We’re an inexperienced team in some parts with a mix of older heads and new blood. It’s been fun to try and balance the older heads with the new blood and so far this season it’s going well.”

Speaking on the match with Lucan Glynn said:

“It was a very tight game. The conditions actually were challenging, it was quite warm. It was very tit for tat. At the end of the first half both teams will be frustrated.

‘They would’ve left a couple of points behind. There were a couple of wides on either side that could have really changed the momentum.”

Marks were leading at half time by three points but a solid second half from Lucan combined with an unfortunate red card for St Marks, saw them get back into the game.

Ultimately Marks would do enough to secure a result from the game with Conor Burke managing 1-05. The remainder of the scores were spread across six other players highlighting the strength in depth that St Marks have at their disposal.

Glynn named some standout performers for the team so far this season but highlighted the importance of the overall squad above all else.

“This will sound like a olitically trained answer but I mean it from the bottom of my heart, I cannot fault anyone. I would have three or four teams picked on a Saturday evening that I’m going through thinking any one of these teams could win.

“It was actually a point I made to some of the lads, they might feel hard done by, not starting and they are entitled to feel hard done by but everybody is performing.”

Indeed there were excellent performances across the pitch from St Marks, Ross Byrne, Callum Byrne, Jack Kielthy and Conor Burke though Glynn admits that he could give names of “six or seven lads who have all been outstanding this year”.

Glynn himself played with St Marks for years before having to retire from this specific team last year due to injury issues.

His first season coaching has been a unique experience now tasked with leading those who were his teammates only a short time ago. He spoke of his expectations at the start of the season.

“We wanted to get out of the group, there’s two different ways to look at it.

‘One is that it’s a negative mindset and your only hope is to not finish bottom.

‘But when you look at the reality of where we were, a lot of players were only playing their first year at adult hurling, it’s my first year in charge and we were only relegated from Intermediate last year.

‘It was a little bit of a transition season. I know people hate that buzzword but it really was a transition year.”

“Our goal was to stabilise ourselves in the league which we did finishing fourth and get into the quarter finals in the hurling championship.

‘We’ve achieved that with two games to go but we aren’t counting our chickens because we really want to have a go and finish as high as we can in our group.”