Down but not out. Hunterstown Rovers may have slipped a division but they'll still contest the intermediate football championship in 2006. Thus, no real harm has been done. Ciaran Carrie is adamant that the Red & Whites are capable of regrouping and rebounding with a bang in the coming season. He's convinced that the ground lost during the '05 campaign can be regained with a slight improvement in attitude and application. Hunterstown Rovers could consider themselves a little bit unfortunate to be relegated to Division 2B at the end of their 2005 campaign. On any other year, the mid-Louth men would probably have survived but a unique set of circumstances meant they surrendered their 2A standing. With two teams going down, Rovers finished third from bottom of the 2A table, eight points above bottom side Naomh Fionnbarra and two clear of sixth-placed Geraldines. The only problem was that the men from Haggardstown/Blackrock reserved all their best stuff for the championship and booked senior status courtesy of IFC glory. The team above them would be relegated - and that team was Hunterstown. An unfortunate quirk of fate for the Rovers but hardly the end of the world either. After all, they will still be involved in the 2006 intermediate championship and there's no reason why they can't return to Division 2A at the first time of asking. No-one's reaching for panic buttons in Hunterstown just yet. Granted, the club has enjoyed better years, but in the greater scheme of things, sliding from 2A to 2B hardly constitutes a crisis. Doughty defender Ciaran Carrie places things firmly in perspective: "It's not a disaster at all. We'd prefer to have stayed up, obviously, but this isn't the end of the world. We know that we'll be pushing for promotion again next year if we get it right and we'll also be in the intermediate championship again, so there's still a lot to play for. "We have a chance now to regroup and put things right. This is a challenge and it's vital that we respond as a team. We have good young players coming through and most of them tasted first-team experience in 2005, so they'll all be a year older and wiser. We should be okay. It's just a matter of showing a bit more commitment and applying ourselves to getting back up." With restructuring of the league looming, nobody wants to get stranded in Division 2B, which is perilously close to junior football. Hunterstown lost their first three league games of the year and then had three impressive wins on the trot against Geraldines, Naomh Fionnbarra and Na Piarsaigh in early summer. They failed to sustain this level of performance, however, and just two wins from the second half of their programme mean they'll be operating in a lower division in '06. In the championship, Hunterstown were in Group A. They began with victory over Glen Emmets at Collon on June 9 but their IFC bid suffered a premature death as they lost to Naomh Malachi, Westerns and St Mochtas in July and August. The 0-11 to 0-7 defeat to Westerns at Ardee on July 24 and the 2-13 to 1-6 thumping at the hands of the Mochtas at the same venue on August 14 made for depressing reading for all followers of the club. The championship dream was over for another year - there'd be no senior football for the Rovers in 2006. The team never found its bearings and when relegation followed salt was added to the wound. In truth though, this wound was at worst just a surface scratch. Nothing that can't be quickly remedied… Reflecting on the year in general, Ciaran believes an improvement in commitment could make all the difference next time round: "We were disappointed with how things worked out but we know ourselves that the commitment wasn't there this year. There were nights when we only had seven or eight at training. I don't know what the reason was, but we weren't going to win anything with that approach. "Things started well but numbers dwindled quickly. Some lads had genuine excuses for not attending, but we'll need a bigger commitment from the group as a whole in 2006." Division 2B is a dangerous place to be right now. A shake-up of the leagues is imminent and Ciaran knows it's imperative that Hunterstown escape ASAP - otherwise they could get caught in the net of junior football: "We have to get it right next year. If the commitment is there, we can do it. We have the players. We have a lot of good, young talent. Seven of the lads are on the [Mattock/Glen Emmets/Hunterstown] U21 team this year, and they're all good players." Tom Kirk (trainer), Gerry Reaburn, Noel Carrie and Frank Meade took charge of team management duties in 2005. At the start of the year, the club set its sights on senior football: "We were hoping to push for promotion," Ciaran confirms. "We had reached the intermediate semi-final in 2004 and we wanted to build on that. Unfortunately, we only managed to win our first game in the championship this year, which wasn't quite what we had in mind." Where and when did it start to go wrong? "Things were going well up until the Glen Emmets game, but there was a big break before we played Naomh Malachi and that's when the numbers started to drop. We had no games at all, only challenges, which isn't enough to keep a team going in the middle of the summer. We lost our momentum and some lads started to lose interest and dropped out. "There was no real shame in losing to the Malachis because they had just come down from senior, but we were hoping to beat the Westerns in the next round. But Westerns were up for it on the day and they fully deserved to beat us. I don't think we won a game in the league for a while after that…" Ciaran Carrie is in his fourth year on the Hunterstown Rovers first team. Having tasted senior football at the beginning of his career, he is keen to get back to the top grade sooner rather than later. A dependable back, he filled the centre half berth in the latter stages of the year and could emerge as a regular in the No.6 shirt. Ciaran won an U21 championship medal with the Hunterstown/Collon/Tullyallen amalgamation in 2003 and was voted Hunterstown's Player of the Year in 2004. He is confident that the long-term prognosis is healthy: "We still have a chance in next year's intermediate championship, so things could be a lot worse. We have plenty of promising talent at the club and I believe we can return to senior football within the next two to three years. "This is going to be a big year for us and hopefully we'll get it right. Paddy Matthews is in Australia for the year, though, and he will be a big loss. Numbers can be tight and sometimes we only have 18 or 19 players for games, so it's going to require a big effort from everybody." Off the field of play, things are ticking along nicely. Towards the end of the year, the club held a successful Car Draw to raise funds for the development of a new training pitch, which they hope to embark on soon. There are also plans in the pipeline for a dressing-room extension. The club's youngsters had a decent year down as far as U10 and U12 levels and there's plenty of optimism in Hunterstown that the club can get back on track in a big way in 2006. Ciaran Carrie will be at the forefront of that drive. Don't go writing Hunterstown Rovers off just yet! Tweet

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