John Paul Murphy eager to push St Vincent's forward

AFTER suffering relegation from the premier intermediate football grade in 2022, St Vincent’s picked themselves up last year and with a young and hungry group, the club will hope the team can move in an upward trajectory.

The city side reached the business end of the IAFC last season, but were beaten by Adrigole by two points at the quarter-final stage. For a club who were in the top-tier 10 years ago, the ambitions will always be high. John Paul Murphy took the reins of his beloved club in the wake of the teams demotion from the third tier in 2022, and has steadied the ship, helped by the addition of Keith Ricken on the sideline.

Now in his second year at the helm, Murphy is looking forward to the year ahead, in what is a very difficult intermediate A football grade.

“We are all excited about 2024 and seeing if we can make another bit of progress,” says the St Vincent’s bainsteoir.

“I will be honest with you, we actually only went back training there a couple of weeks ago. We decided to give fellas a break. We didn’t want to go back too early as there is a long campaign there. I know the league is now up and running, we lost the first game last Thursday against Bandon by two points, but we just didn’t want to go back too soon. We want to make sure we are right for when the championship starts.

“We want to time it a bit better this year, not saying we didn’t last year, but I have learnt an awful lot from my first season in charge that I’ll bring into this year.” 

It’s Murphy’s first adult manager's gig with the club, he only retired in 2021, but took over a team that were just after getting relegated, but, St Vincent’s can look back on 2023 where they did make progress as they made the knockout stages of the IAFC. But, how did the manager turn things around in a short period?

“It was a disappointing end to the campaign, as I thought we were better than what we showed on the day against Adrigole,” Murphy says.

“I think it was something like 0-7 to 0-5, and we did have regrets as we had a good few goal chances that we just didn’t take, but look, you live and learn I suppose, and I do think we will be better because of it.

“We have to put it into perspective as well, when I took over the team, the dressing room was down after what happened the season before. The team were getting a bit of a beating in a lot of games above in the premier intermediate grade, so getting relegated was a good thing in a way. It gave the club a chance to reset and rebuild again. We had seven players or eight players under the age of 20 that played championship for us last year, so it was a rebuilding job.” 

In general though, Murphy feels St Vincent’s are heading back in the right direction, after what has been a challenging number of years for the proud city club.

“The club are putting in a lot of work to try and improve things. Anything that we ask for, we get it, there is never any bother. There are a lot of people working hard behind the scenes as well. The underage section is strong enough, so hopefully we can drive on and get back to where we were a few years ago, you know,” he said.

In the IAFC group stage, St Vincent’s will face last year's beaten finalists Mitchelstown, Glanworth and Ballinora. As is the case nowadays, it’s a difficult group to predict. The city side will meet Mitchelstown first day out, and Murphy says that game will be crucial, not do or die, but a key outing.

“Mitchelstown have been knocking on the door for a long time, they are probably due a county at this stage. We play them first, and it will be important that we hit the ground running. We then have Glanworth. That will be tough. We played them last year and we got a last minute goal to beat them. I don’t know much about Ballinora.

“The first goal is to get out of the group, and after that it’s all about trying to kick on and see what happens.” Murphy concluded.