WHEN THE ground is soft and the sky is low, delicacy is never the order of the day. So it proved last Sunday in Tullamore, as Garrycastle found a way to be ahead when the music stopped to take their – and Westmeath’s – first Leinster club title with a last-kick win over Blanchardstown side St Brigid’s.

When you ask Gary Dolan what made the difference, you get an answer that’s sufficient purely on to the day that was in it. “Pure and utter thickness!” he says.

While plenty was made of the helter-skelter journey St Brigid’s had to make to get to Sunday, Garrycastle had their own travails along the way. The standard-bearers in Westmeath for the past decade with six county titles since 2001 and the past three in a row, they’ve always found Leinster a struggle too steep.

Portlaoise were too canny for them in the 2009 final and Kilmacud Crokes ushered them out of the competition last year when they came in bouncing.

They were underdogs again on Sunday, but that meant nothing in Dolan’s mind. Bookmaking can often find it hard to weight a refusal to be denied.

“You have to have hurt in GAA,” says Dolan. “If you don’t have hurt, you are not going to overcome the biggest challenges. You have to feel the pain before you get there and we had awful determination. We felt we were the better team both days (against Portlaoise and Crokes).

“It’s very hard to take when you lose a final and come off the field thinking that if we did a few things differently we could have taken them. It’s that that drove us on.”

They needed every bit of it too. Sunday’s final was a cakewalk for Garrycastle for two-thirds of the afternoon, so much so that they led by eight points with 22 minutes to go. When Dolan rose above Brigid’s goalkeeper Shane Supple to flick a goal eight minutes after the break, you’d have struggled to find a soul in the ground who could see a way back for the Dublin champions.

It looked like a full-stop, nothing more complicated than that. For Garrycastle to withstand the subsequent Brigid’s Lazarus routine, sapped every resource they had.

“You are going to have your purple patch on these games,” says Dolan. “St Brigid’s are a very good side, a very nippy side, so we said it at half-time that they were going to have a purple patch and we were going to have to weather the storm at some stage. It was a long auld storm! But we did weather it in the end.”

Funny how the world turns.

The All-Ireland semi-final looms now on the third weekend in February against a team Garrycastle know better than they do half the clubs in their own county. St Brigid’s of Roscommon are sited only four miles, across the country boundary that runs through Lough Ree.

The links are endless.

Most of them went to the same school as each other and Garrycastle brought their coach Anthony Cunningham aboard after seeing what he was able to do with St Brigid’s first of all.

And, of course, Gary, Dessie and James Dolan – along with second-half substitute on Sunday Alan Fox – will be facing first cousins in Frankie, Garvan and Darran Dolan when spring arrives.

Should make for an, er, mixed Christmas, wouldn’t you say Gary?

“Ha! There will be nothing mixed about it – it will be fairly straightforward. We will enjoy the Christmas and start focusing on that after Christmas. There are going to be seven of us on the field, it’s going to be brilliant.

“We have great respect and great pride for the lads across the water. We would always be in contact. As the crow flies we are probably only a few miles away from each other. We are all good pals and it will be a mighty occasion.

“Every year we play them two or three times in a challenge, we know each other inside out. The two clubs are, so to speak, neighbouring parishes. There is only a lake splitting us.”

For now, a lake.

Come the third weekend of February, a shot at Croke Park on March 17th. Take it delicacy won’t be the order of that day either.

Next Up . . .

All-Ireland Club SFC Semi-finals

Sunday, Feb 19th

St Brigid’s v Garrycastle

Dr Crokes v Crossmaglen Rangers

(Venues, times TBA)