SAFC: Knocknagree's extra-time win 'not good for the heart', says John Fintan Daly

Ask any team at the outset of the championship campaign what they’d love to happen and the answer will be that automatic qualification for the semi-finals would be ideal.

And yet, by the time the last four comes around, those sides who have bypassed the quarter-finals may suffer from the longer lay-off compared to opponents who are coming in with the benefit of a victory.

In such a landscape, surely Knocknagree’s extra-time SAFC quarter-final victory over neighbours Kanturk on Saturday evening will leave them primed for Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaidh.

“Yeah, well, time will tell,” said manager John Fintan Daly.

“I'm sure the team that are waiting for us won't be thinking that way; they'll be happy to get straight through.

“It’s not good for the heart, though! Here I am and less than 24 hours ago, I had a junior football semi-final with the same squad of players and with the same management, and we took it down to the wire and lost to Castlemagner by a couple of points.

“Then I had to go to bed last night, get up today and do it again. We don't do things easily back here!”

With time almost up, it appeared as if Knocknagree’s aim to reach a fourth straight semi-final would come up short but they scored two late points to tie the match after 60 minutes.

“That bit of ingenuity at the end of normal time ended up with Gearóid Looney getting on the ball,” Daly said.

“If there was one player on my team that I'd want to finish the game and draw the match, I'd give him the ball, because he will do the right thing always.

“Kanturk are a bigger team and they owned the ball at times, but I thought the reason we won it was because we had a better bench.

“It was a huge impact, and especially when you go to extra time, the bench is important, and I thought we showed that bit of ingenuity to hammer out those scores at the end.”

They will need all that again in the last four.

“I'll try to draw a breath for a couple of days and take a rest and then we’ll think it through,” Daly said.

“I'm thrilled for this group, for the dedication and loyalty they’ve shown. I've been doing this job with them, this is my 13th consecutive season.

“When I started with them, they hadn't won a league or a championship title in 25 years or something. Within a couple of years, we were in the Duhallow championship final and we won two.

“We came along then and won the Cork junior football championship in 2017, won the Munster, won the All-Ireland in 2018, won the intermediate in 2019, won the premier intermediate in 2020 – played in 2021 – played in the 2022 senior A final, played in the semi-final in 2023, played the senior A final again in 2024.

“And this year, we've gone up to Division 1 for the first time, the first Duhallow club to ever do that. We're in the semi-final here, so we must be doing something right!”

For beaten Kanturk manager Eoghain O‘Connor, there was acknowledgement of Knocknagree’s clinical edge along with regret at not holding out in normal time.

“They have forwards that will get scores that not many teams in this grade, or the next grade, will compete with,” he said.

“They got them in the vital moments at the end to get it level. We conceded a bad goal in extra time, we’d be disappointed from our point of view, and that goal we couldn't draw it back after that.

“You could see we had two weeks' work done on it – we'd probably take a third week if we got it! – but that's the tightness of the championship.”