Nugent believes Ferbane are on upward curve at right time

By Kevin Egan

Through most of this year’s senior football championship campaign, Ferbane captain Kevin Nugent was battling injury, and the club was battling a dip in form.

Nugent was never that far off and his team were just not quite where they needed to be as well, but with Tullamore going from strength to strength, it was hard to believe that the west Offaly side was ready to take a step up from 2023, when they were two points short against Tullamore in what was widely-assessed as an uninspiring game of football.

Then there was Rhode, the ideal opponent for any team that needed a hard deadline to get their house in order. Niall McNamee’s absence robbed the Village of a key scoring threat, but there was never any question of the 2022 county champions making life easy for Ferbane.

Enter Nugent with a man of the match performance, and three points from play from wing-back. In their semi-final two weeks later, Ferbane bounced back from an early five-point deficit to beat Shamrocks by six (2-13 to 2-7) – so are their wobbles behind them?

“I was struggling for a couple of months with an injury alright but I think I am on top of it now. It is just management at this stage rather than not doing too much with it. It is just knowing when you need to step out of the training or a night off,” replied the Dublin-based Garda.

“We did start off wobbly, that would be a good word to describe it. We lost by a point to Shamrocks, but we were five down going into injury time, so the scoreline did them an injustice. We scraped by Durrow, got through Edenderry, albeit with just a draw, and then just got over the line against Rhode.

“It was nice the last few minutes against Shamrocks that it wasn’t really helter skelter and we probably left a good bit on the table. After the match there was nobody really buzzing because we knew we just had to get the job done. It feels like we are on an upward trajectory.”

Against Shamrocks, it was Ferbane’s inside forward line that took the lead on the scoring front. Along with Darragh Flynn’s 2-5, 0-3 apiece from Joe Maher and Cian Johnson represented the bulk of their tally. But against Tullamore, with so many bodies expected to be flooded back, being able to pick off scores from distance is crucial. So does that put pressure on him to once again contribute on the scoreboard?

“We know ourselves from playing them the last few years that they are very well set up, they do their job very well and they are very disciplined as a team.

"We’ll take the game as it comes but if you told Niall Stack (Tullamore manager) that Kevin Nugent would be top scorer in a county final, he would probably take it. If I am scoring three points and I’m top scorer then that’s probably not what we want as a team. If it happens, it happens, and if we get the win, that is all that matters. But I imagine we’ll need to get our top forwards in scoring positions and get goals.”

Is that a lesson from last year, when one Tullamore goal made all the difference?

“We have probably evolved from that game because I think we have a bit more directness now, and Tullamore have evolved as well,” Nugent responded.

“I don’t think trying to be driven by a past defeat is a good approach, there’s only so many times you can go back to that well. It is about the football at the end of the day so for us, Sunday is just about performing on the day more so than worrying about the past,” he added.