AIB Connacht Club SFC Semi-Final<\/p>\n
ST. BRIGID\u2019S 1-21 (1-1-19) BALLINA STEPHENITES 3-8 (3-1-6)<\/p>\n
Kevin Egan at King & Moffatt Dr. Hyde Park<\/p>\n
2023 AIB Connacht champions St. Brigid\u2019s are back on the glory trail as they played some scintillating attacking football this afternoon at Dr. Hyde Park to overcome Ballina Stephenites.<\/p>\n
The Mayo champions got some traction close to goal, hitting the net three times to stay in contention, but they simply couldn\u2019t match their hosts around the middle third, particularly on the St. Brigid\u2019s 45m line where Brian Stack, Paul McGrath and Man of the Match Ruaidhr\u00ed Fallon were absolutely imperious.<\/p>\n
In 2025, St. Brigid\u2019s have shown no huge affinity for kicking two pointers and here again, they hit just one on a pristine playing surface. However when they moved the ball through the hands and looked to pick apart Ballina with their accurate passing game and direct running, they were impossible to stop.<\/p>\n
Two high balls from Frank Irwin gave the Stephenites a dream start. The first was touched past Conor Carroll by Dylan Thornton for the game\u2019s opening goal, the second just about crept over the crossbar to make it 1-1 to no score.<\/p>\n
There were 13 more scores before half-time, 12 of them for the hosts. Shane Cunnane got them settled into the game with a point off the outside of his right boot, Senan Kilbride hammered the ball past David Clarke after snaffling a loose handpass across the full-back line and the scores started to flow freely as Brigid\u2019s players spilled through the middle and created one overlap after another, setting up points for Ciar\u00e1n Sugrue, Conor Hand, Ben O\u2019Carroll, Brian Derwin and McGrath.<\/p>\n
Evan Regan scored a highly unorthodox goal for Ballina with an overhead kick, struck with his back to goal while Brigid\u2019s scored with just one out of six attempts from distance, Ruaidhr\u00ed Fallon hitting the target when Ballina backed off him and allowed him the shot. Ben O\u2019Carroll and Bobby Nugent were lively but were also guilty of missing gilt-edged chances that on another day, they\u2019ll need.<\/p>\n
Today, they were comfortable.<\/p>\n
The second half was more of the same, St. Brigid\u2019s racking up the white flags, reeled in only by Ben Thornton hammering a low shot past Conor Carroll to keep Ballina in touch.<\/p>\n
In the final quarter St. Brigid\u2019s ran their bench and Ballina did pick some holes in the Brigid\u2019s back line to tack on 0-6 from the 48th minute onwards, but they still couldn\u2019t stop the bleeding at the other end.<\/p>\n
In possession St. Brigid\u2019s were in complete control, looking after the ball and giving U-20 attacker Charlie O\u2019Carroll a chance to shine as he came off the bench to kick two fine scores, ensuring smooth progression through to what should be a fantastic Connacht decider against Maigh Cuilinn at the same venue in a fortnight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AIB Connacht Club SFC Semi-Final ST. BRIGID\u2019S 1-21 (1-1-19) BALLINA STEPHENITES 3-8 (3-1-6) Kevin Egan at King &…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-143939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}