It was a disappointing year for St Kevins, who failed to escape the suffocating clutches of junior football, despite a gallant showing in both league and championship. Niall Treadwell reflects on a frustrating season and looks forward to 2005, when the Philipstown men will mount a concerted effort to regain promotion to intermediate ranks. St Kevins will not look back on the 2004 season with any particularly fond memories. The Philipstown crew surprisingly found themselves in the unglamorous confines of junior fare and were determined to make an immediate return to a higher grade of football. The manner of their relegation at the end of the previous season had been luckless to say the least and the Red & Blacks were fancied to exact a hasty return to intermediate football. It didn't work out that way, however. Junior football is notoriously competitive and scrappy, and there are always at least three genuine promotion contenders - with only two promotion spots up for grabs! In 2004, St Mochtas, Glen Emmets and the Kevins were the three stand-out junior sides in the Wee County and it was the challengers from Louth village and Tullyallen who took the promotion prizes. St Kevins can rightfully claim to have been the third-best team in both the junior league and championship, but that knowledge provides scant consolation. It won't comfort them during the long winter months, with the menacing prospect of junior football again lurking derisively on the horizon. There's no escaping the truth. And the truth is that the Kevins messed up by getting themselves relegated in the first place - and again by failing to secure promotion in 2004. St Kevins had reached an intermediate championship semi-final in '03 - their third in four years! - and were knocking on the door of senior football. Thus, demotion came as a shock to the system. And the shockwaves continue to reverberate from the clubhouse throughout the Philipstown landscape… The club's present predicament does not sit favourably with anyone associated with the club, least of all inspirational midfielder Niall Treadwell, whose honest and forthright assessment of the situation gives a clear insight into the anguish and annoyance that's prevalent in Philipstown these days: "It's a disaster," he says. "We're very disappointed with the way things went in 2004 and we have only ourselves to blame. "We weren't expecting it to go like that. We thought we'd go back up and we're fierce disappointed to be facing the prospect of another year in junior football. "We'd been pushing for a place in senior football and we never even considered that we might end up going the other way. When we did, we set ourselves the target of going straight back up to intermediate by winning a trophy - either the junior championship or the Division Three league. But we got a rude awakening and I suppose the reality of it is that we'll have to put in a much bigger effort in 2005." St Kevins' 2004 season effectively ended on Saturday September 25. Any hopes they were entertaining of securing promotion were dashed when they lost their Round Ten league game at home to fellow contenders Glen Emmets, 1-10 to 1-8. That defeat left the Philipstown men in a hopeless position with two games remaining, three points adrift of the Tullyallen men who, having lost the junior final, would make no mistake with intermediate football firmly within their grasp. In the junior championship, it was a similar story, as the Kevins were again narrowly edged out. The Philipstown men were in the dreaded Group B, a three-team group which allowed no room for error as only one side progressed to the knockout stage. In their first outing, against Annaghminnon on Friday July 2, the Kevins turned on the style to crush Annaghminnon Rovers by ten points, 0-15 to 0-5. Annaghminnon had drawn with St Mochtas in their first outing, which meant the final game in the round-robin section was a winner-takes-all clash between St Kevins and St Mochtas. The group eliminator was played at St Brigid's Park on Friday July 16 and it was (eventual champions) St Mochtas who clinched a semi-final tilt at John Mitchells by virtue of a 1-15 to 1-11 victory. Midfielder Gareth Boylan fired the Kevins goal eight minutes after the restart. The Philipstown men might well have had two other majors before the break, but it just wasn't to be. They could have no complaints about the result as the referee afforded both teams every opportunity, playing seven minutes of additional time at the end of each half. The abrupt nature of the Kevins' relegation at the end of 2003 still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It was the tightest Division 2B campaign ever and the two sides that went down - Kevins and the Mochtas - were decidedly unfortunate to bite the bullet. Niall recalls: "With three games to go in 2003, we were fighting for promotion, and we'd just missed out on a championship final place. But the league developed into a real dogfight and we were in serious trouble when we lost our third-last and second-last games. We finished on ten points and that would normally be more than enough to survive. The whole thing dragged out into the first week in December, by which stage some of our lads were gone away, and we were caught out." It was the same in Division Three in 2004. St Kevins found themselves in the unacceptable position where they had no competitive match for six weeks, as the league was adjourned while the championship finished. They resumed normal service by inflicting a first competitive defeat of the season upon the newly-crowned junior champions St Mochtas, but it was difficult to keep it going and the Emmets game on September 25 proved a bridge too far. On a positive note, Niall points out: "We have some great players, so it's really a matter of getting them to click. We know we're as good as any intermediate team in the county, and we always made it to the latter stages of the IFC. We're good enough to beat any junior or intermediate team in the county on our day." Deep down, do the Kevins still consider themselves intermediate material? "Yes, definitely. We've got ourselves in a bit of a fix, but we've a lot of good footballers and we're way below our proper level at the moment. We should be doing better. Perhaps we need to place a great emphasis on fitness and to show more commitment…" Niall lets the sentence trail off. St Kevins found themselves out of contention in 2004 after losing only one game in the championship and two in the league. This shows that there's really no room for error in junior football in Louth: "We were hoping not be junior again in 2005 but it's not the end of the world. We just have to knuckle down." The Kevins have received a wake-up call. "Our eyes have been opened," Niall confirms. "We were confident that we'd have no difficulty going back up and I think what happened has woken everybody up. The lads are gutted, and even embarrassed. Some of the lads are pushing on and were hoping that there'd be one or two years of senior football in store for them before hanging up the boots. "It's annoying when you see a team like O'Connells, who we used to beat regularly, going up to senior and holding their own. We can't help thinking that it could have been us." Niall makes no excuses regarding the '04 championship exit at the hands of would-be winners St Mochtas: "The Mochtas had their homework done and had us pinned back from the start. They played out of their skins and were worthy winners." Were the Kevins perhaps complacent, bearing in mind that they had beaten Annaghminnon by ten points while Mochtas had only drawn with the Red & Whites? "Not at all. We knew the Mochtas/Annaghminnon game was a derby and that there was no point reading into it. We played well against Annaghminnon, though we expected more from them. But we certainly didn't expect anything easy from the Mochtas. On the day, they were much hungrier and we froze. "But we were still going well in the league and we beat Young Irelands in our next game to keep the pressure on. But the six-week break, where we weren't involved in any competitive games at all, did us no favours." Where was it lost? "Maybe in the first game against Glen Emmets, when we lost to them in Tullyallen. We should have won that game. We led all the way but Joey Carolan flicked two goals to the net late on and that result probably came back to haunt us. We really should have put them away." Niall Treadwell has been on the St Kevins first team for a decade now, winning a DMP Shield and playing against Dreadnots in the 2000 IFC final. He still believes there are good times ahead: "Our first priority is to get out of junior and then to hopefully get a good run in the intermediate league and move up to Division 2A. I think that's our proper level. Division 2A is where we want to be, and it's a realistic target. We still have a young team, with an average age of 25, and we can go places if we stick together. This team has been together for five years, since the 2000 intermediate final, and it's just a matter of everybody putting in a greater effort." The Kevins are primed to bounce back with a vengeance. Tweet

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