PIHC: Valley Rovers eager to build on Lisgoold victory 

Noel O’Donovan’s first championship game back in charge of Valley Rovers was a real cliffhanger a fortnight ago.

The Carrigdhoun side were leading for the majority against last year’s IAHC winners Lisgoold, as the team in green and white did enough to win 2-18 to 1-18.

A great start to what is a tough Co-Op SuperStores PIHC Group 3. Next up for Valley Rovers is Dungourney on Sunday in Blarney at 4pm.

Reflecting on the confidence-boosting victory last time out, O’Donovan was proud of his players.

“We were delighted, a lot of pressure on it, so happy to have won,” he says.

“We are pleased with the win, but we won’t be getting ahead of ourselves. It could have gone either way, but we were lucky enough to dig it out at the end. Lisgoold are a good team with good forwards.

“There’s nothing wrong with their backs either, so we knew it was going to be a tight game. We spoke about that. We were just delighted to have come out on the right side.

“We knew Lisgoold were going to come with a big performance having won the grade below last year. We tried to visualise at half-time that we were going down the home straight in a battle. That's what happened. We were lucky to come out of it.” 

O’Donovan enlisted highly-rated coach Eoin Galvin from Ballincollig this season, who also looks after the strength and conditioning. Valley Rovers’ fitness levels and physicality were key reasons why they did get over the line two weeks ago, something that will be vital again this weekend.

Dungourney will be on a high after beating Mallow 3-21 to 1-19.

“We won the first game last year and we didn’t follow it up,” the Valley Rovers manager said.

“We failed to get out of our group last season, the most important thing is that we get another performance against Dungourney. We are far from safe and far from going through, so we are playing Dungourney in what we would call another county final.

“We know how important this game is and we want to back up what we did against Lisgoold.” O’Donovan concluded.

Valley Rovers ended up bottom of their group on two points in the last campaign, so they know that the gritty three-point win over Lisgoold will count for little if they don’t back it up.