Glass left shattered after last year’s All-Ireland defeat but Glens determined to put that right

Six days after last year’s All-Ireland club senior football final Conor Glass sat in Derry’s dressingroom at Owenbeg having convinced himself the Limerick footballers were all that mattered. His club colleague Ethan Doherty pulled on a Derry jersey that day too as Derry chalked up a 0-16 to 0-4 victory over the Treaty County in their opening Division Two National League game of the season.

It’s a contest that has not lived long in the memory, unlike events of the previous weekend at Croke Park when Glen’s All-Ireland ambitions were crushed in controversial circumstances.

“A defeat is difficult to take, never mind an All-Ireland final,” says Glass now, one year on. “On a personal note I had a chance to win the game and the Crokes goalkeeper pulled off an unbelievable save.

“A lot of the 24 hours, 48 hours afterwards does come into self-sabotaging, getting in your own head a bit, but that’s natural with any competitor. Myself, Ethan and a few boys went straight back to Derry and played in the first round in Owenbeg, so that was my coping mechanism, to go back and play for Derry.

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“[The All-Ireland final] probably didn’t leave my head for a good month or two, and that’s probably because I cared so much about it.”

The fallout from that club final, when Kilmacud had too many players on the field for the last play, ensured the outcome was debated for weeks afterwards and made it impossible for players in both camps to move on.

“Because it kept being brought up in conversation whereas if the game had finished normally you probably would have forgotten about it,” says Glass. “There was that lingering unknown of the replay and the way in which it was handled. But we’re back in an All-Ireland final now and really looking forward to it.”

And they have got there after beating Crokes in an All-Ireland semi-final at Páirc Esler earlier this month, a match played under a blanket of fog in Newry, which provided a fittingly eerie coda to a chaotic and unfortunate saga. “You did have to adapt your game a bit,” says Glass. “You couldn’t see the player 50m or 60m in front of you, being able to kick the ball or find your spare player when you came out of defence, you weren’t able to do it. It was the same for both teams.”

But on this occasion the outcome was different to what it was 12 months ago as Glen managed to achieve some measure of revenge, though it will amount to a hill of beans if they don’t complete the job when they face St Brigid’s of Roscommon in Sunday’s AIB All-Ireland club senior football final at Croke Park, 3.30pm.

Since his return from Australia in late 2020, Glass has stirred both his club and county to life – Derry won Ulster titles in 2022 and 2023, while Glen are current back-to-back county and provincial champions.

Despite the incessant nature of the last two seasons the 26-year-old has been a central figure for both sides and believes his Aussie Rules experience helped prepare his body for such demands.

“I was with Hawthorn from about 15-16 years of age and they put me through what they called an injury-prevention programme,” he says. “It didn’t include any weights, it was pretty much body weight stuff. That was probably what helped for the last 10 years or so. I haven’t had any serious injuries.

“Being in a professional environment for five years put me in a good place as well, knowing how to look after my body, what resources are available to athletes these days. I probably would put it down to the early days of the Hawthorn programme. I’m in a very good place at the minute, my head space is in a very good place. I got six weeks off after the Kerry game last year, I was able to switch off and go to Greece.”

He has spoken with Mickey Harte and while the idea of taking on Kerry in a league opener in Tralee on January 27th is appealing, Glass has made no firm decision yet on when he will make his county bow for 2024.

All of that is for post-Sunday. Glen’s return to Croke Park sees the Derry champions on the verge of replicating the achievements of the last two club champions as Kilmacud Crokes and Kilcoo returned after final losses to claim the Andy Merrigan Cup.

“It’s a long journey back, if I had been talking about getting back to an All-Ireland final 12 months ago after losing to Crokes it wouldn’t have been healthy, to be honest,” says Glass. “It’s such a long way back, never mind getting out of Derry and Ulster because they’re seriously competitive competitions. I was chatting briefly to a fellah yesterday and I was saying it’s a privilege to be here but then he came back at me and said, ‘you deserve to be here’.

“And we do deserve to be here. We put the work in over the last six to eight months. All the players have stayed focused on the task at hand, no boys went away and travelled, they were fully up for getting back to an All-Ireland final.”

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