SAFC: Former Kerry player Griffin keen to help Éire Óg make their Mark

The last two winners of the McCarthy Insurance Group SAFC – Newcestown in 2023 and Carrigaline last year – did so in the year after relegation from premier senior.

In 2024, Éire Óg were the team to drop down from the first tier to the second. The Ovens club’s response has been positive, qualifying from a tough group and then beating Bishopstown in a quarter-final tie to qualify for Saturday’s semi-final against Cill na Martra.

An immediate return was obviously targeted, but Éire Óg’s Mark Griffin makes clear that, while it was a consolation knowing the previous two relegated sides managed it, nobody was putting too much store in it.

“In a small way,” he says, “but there's no guarantee of that, just because they did it.

“They obviously performed very well last year and the year before to actually achieve that. It's not a stock answer, but there's a lot of very good teams in this grade.

“If you take out the top three in the premier senior grade, there isn’t much difference between the rest of those clubs and the top four or six in the senior A. We see that from playing in the league, it's very competitive.

“We were hugely disappointed – not just that we got relegated last year, though obviously, there was a bit of disappointment with that – but we performed fairly poorly.

“It was no hard-luck story; we deserved what we got at the end of it. There was a bit of motivation to try to put that right again, but we’re only at the semi-finals at the moment.”

The former Kerry inter-county star works for Jones Engineering in Cork and did commute for a period to play for his home club St Michael’s/Foilmore – “It's about a five-hour road trip and I was getting niggles and injuries and just frustrated with the whole thing,” he says. 

Settled with his wife, Waterford native Maria, and their son Rian, his links with Ciarán Sheehan and Daniel Goulding brought him to Éire Óg and it has been a positive partnership.

Having opened with a win over Kanturk, they then fell to Newmarket - going into the last set of fixtures in their group, each side had two points, creating what were essentially a pair of quarter-final qualifiers. A win over Kilshannig brought Éire Óg to the last four, where Cill na Martra had been waiting after earning a bye.

Helping Griffin to enjoy his football more have been the new rules. While they might seem to be geared towards aiding attacking players, Griffin relishes how they have helped to put the art of defending back in the spotlight.

“The way I was, I suppose, the way I grew up and the way I was trained, playing corner-back or full-back, was like, ‘That's your man,’ and that went away from the game since around 2010 onwards.

“It kind of went away and the one-on-one defending – it was rare that you were caught in a one-on-one situation, and it was mostly blanket cover, hold them up.

“Somebody will support you and then you try to turn over the ball and you break away, so there was very little one-on-one defending.

“I always enjoyed if there was pressure on the ball outside and it was a one-on-one for the ball, it was a competition.

“That's exciting for a defender as well. If you don’t want to be stuck one-on-one, it's probably not the best thing, but it definitely brings back that one-on-one defending, that the likes of Anthony Lynch or Marc Ó Sé excelled at – even if you got the ball, the work was only starting.”