AIB GAA Club Championships: Corofin’s Stephen Rochford on the road to Croker

Mayo. Croke Park. All-Ireland finals.

There isn’t many men from the west that can say they have claimed a Celtic Cross on the biggest stage of all but Corofin manager Stephen Rochford is different. The former corner back with Crossmolina claimed an All-Ireland club title in 2001 with an historic victory over Nemo Rangers.

He’ll be hoping that he can bring some of that luck to bear on the Galway side next Tuesday as they face Slaugthneil of Derry in the AIB GAA All-Ireland Senior Club Championship football final in Croke Park.

The game takes place on March 17th but for the class of 2001, the outbreak of foot and mouth meant the game was played on Easter Monday.

This year may be the last that the decider will be played mid-March if plans to change the calendar year come into force. The Mayo man isn’t bothered that the finals may lose some of their magic by not being played on the national holiday:

“It’s a day in the calendar. The 13 months that you put in beforehand is more etched in your memory. The 60 minutes that you play in the game, does somebody remember whether it’s on a Tuesday or a Thursday? I don’t think they do. Having played in 2001 on Easter Monday, the year of foot and mouth, it didn’t necessarily affect us to be honest, and it definitely didn’t downgrade my Celtic Cross I can certainly tell you.”

“First standout memory of that was hearing on the radio, I was working in the bank in the back office and heard the game was off. I was thinking, ‘How can the game be off?’. Then wondering how we were going to fill the time. I think it was pretty early in March that it got called off, so there was a four week period after Paddy’s Day as well. I think the hardest challenge, calibrate your mind to thinking we’re three weeks away to we’re seven weeks away. But we’re 14 years from 2001 and 12 years on from 2003, and the game has changed – even at club level. Experience-wise I’ll help the lads, but it has moved on. I think we’re coping quite well with it.”

For a county with such a strong proud tradition of GAA its remarkable how often success for sides from Galway  has been achieved with Mayo men. Rochford is widely regarded as one the finest managers on the club scene in Connacht but was denied an opportunity with the Mayo U21’s in October 2012 in somewhat controversial circumstances.

Mayo’s loss was Corofin’s opportunity and he is the first non-local to take charge of the club side. He believes that he has almost found a second spiritual home that echoes his own football development,

‘The thing that mirrors Crossmolina is that it’s a rural area with football being the number one passion.  It’s very much a rural area; it’s two parishes of Belclair and Corofin married together.  But they’re just fanatics about their football.

“I mean, you go there on a Tuesday night mid-summer and you’d find it hard to get parking in Belclair. There’s U10s, there’s ladies going on, U14s are coming out training the same time you’re going.  So, the similarities are that they’ve a drug of football.”

“I mean, being the first outsider that they’ve had, there may have been that bit of trepidation.  But the committee and the players have been very supportive.   I suppose it helped winning the county championship (in 2013).  Maybe having lost the first round of the Connacht championship, people were rethinking,but thankfully we re-saddled and so far, so good.”

The disappointing events of the 2013 may not be discussed within the Corofin camp explicitly but it’s hard to escape the sense that there is a feeling of unfinished business in regards to their ambitions.

The Galway side won the county title but fell at the penultimate hurdle in the province to a sharp and well organised Castlebar side. Rochford isn’t drawing directly on the result but the lessons the club learned from the performance itself :

“Castlebar are a fine team; they went all the way to the All-Ireland final.  So there was no shame in having lost to Castlebar.  Whether we were made favourites for that game, this game, the next game, whatever it is, it’s outside our control and that’s very much a theme that we’ve spoken about.

“We look at what the controllables are. People will say one thing, they’ll write something else. It doesn’t really affect the group, and we’ve tried to keep that as an issue that we don’t talk about.  And we just and get on with the game and hit our targets within games.”

Corofin’s new determination and focus was evident as they put St Vincent’s to the sword last month with a clinical display of counter attacking football and brilliant tactics to smother the Dublin sides at source.

The eventual winning margin of five points tied in with a trend underway since their Galway county final win over St Michael’s by 5-12 to 0-9.

The Galway side appear on paper at least to have come through rather unscathed from Connacht all the way to the All-Ireland final. Rochford however feels that the cold facts of winning margins fails to tell the true story of their campaign to date.

“I don’t want to be repeating myself but we can’t control what the opposition do. We try to play as best we can. Even going into the London game, we were 0-2 to 0-1 up at half-time but we actually hadn’t played that poorly in the first-half.

“We’d missed two goal chances under terrible conditions but I never felt that we were going to lose that game. We weren’t playing as badly as maybe the scoreline would suggest. To win the game 0-9 to 0-2, we were in good control.

“Even with Vincent’s, we won the game by five points, it was back to two midway through the second-half, so while we were in control it was a tight game and it was played at a high intensity so the hope is that going to carry us into the All-Ireland final.”

Speaking to Rochford it’s easy to see why he admires Joe Schmidt so much. The Mayo man uses many of the same words in terms of game management and like the Kiwi, Rochford is always looking for areas to improve.

Their opponents next week were impressive in their decisive win over Austin Stacks in their semi final played 24 hours after Corofin’s most recent triumph.

Rochford was more than a keen observer of the Ulster champions. The Mayo man knows his side face a massive challenge if they are to get over their opponents who he describes as one of the hardest working sides he’s ever observed,

“I was in Portlaoise for the semi-final. I was hugely impressed by their appetite for work, their unwillingness to bow. As a Mayo person I’ve seen Kieran Donaghy stick the knife in. They weren’t rattled by it. They played against the breeze but they didn’t shoot a wide until five minutes to go in the game. That’s a serious stat and anybody that was there would have seen the conditions on the day.