Oram didn't waste much time in securing a return passage to intermediate football, booking promotion by capturing the junior football league. What a year it was for Oram! By virtue of outright victory in the 2002 Paragon Bar junior football league, the Sarsfields booked an instant return to the intermediate grade. Edmund Meegan's side finished the season in barnstorming fashion, carving out eight consecutive victories to capture the Dr Ward Cup. The league final defeat of Cremartin over the second weekend of November was pretty much a perfect end to Oram's season and it's with great confidence that they'll re-assume their place in intermediate football in 2003. Everyone associated with the club is happy with how things worked out ultimately in recent months . . . despite the hiccup of a painful championship exit. Oram finished the year very strongly, stringing together a magnificent sequence of results that enabled them to achieve their prime objective of promotion from the basement grade. Ideally, of course, they were hoping to win the junior championship but, in the final analysis, they have gone back up, which is definitely the most important thing. Losing to Aughnamullen in a championship quarter-final replay could easily have led to a frantic scramble for panic buttons - but Oram are made of sterner stuff. The team came back brilliantly from that 2-10 to 1-8 replay defeat and won their next six league matches as well as the semi-final and final. Nobody could've asked for more. It was a tremendous surge and there was a great spirit and atmosphere within the club. The older players took prominent roles at training, which was the key factor behind their success. They led by example, and that brought the best out of the younger lads. The manner in which Oram turned their season around to pluck glory from the ashes of a shattering championship defeat was highly commendable. The championship quarter-final replay defeat to Aughnamullen was a crushing blow and would have broken many's the lesser team. But not Oram. They simply redoubled their efforts and put in place a faultless contingency plan. If at first you don't succeed . . . An impressive winning run in the league left Oram in a three-way tie at the top of the table, themselves, Aughnamullen and Corduff all locked on 26 points apiece. Cremartin, with 21 points, took fourth spot. Those four sides lined up for the semi-finals: Oram V Aughnamullen; Corduff V Cremartin. Revenge was exacted upon Aughnamullen in a low-scoring junior league semi-final slog fought out in dreadful conditions on November 3rd. The weather was not in any way conducive to decent football, so it would come down to who wanted it most. That team was Oram, who prevailed by 1-5 to 0-6. Oram led virtually from start to finish, their cause greatly helped by a match-winning performance from corner forward John Mone, who weighed in with a goal and three points. Midfielder Dermot McBride also had a massive influence on proceedings. Oram led by three points at the break, 0-4 to 0-1, and Mone effectively ended the game as the contest when he pounced for the game's decisive score in the second half. Meanwhile, Cremartin surprised championship-winners Corduff in the other 'semi' to set up an intriguing final paring of Oram V Cremartin, a fixture with no shortage of spice! The final was played at Toome on Sunday November 10th. Once more (hardly surprisingly, considering the time of year!), conditions were far from ideal, leading to a scrappy enough game with little or no free-flowing fare. Still, the teams did their best to serve up an entertaining match in the face of adversity. It was a high-scoring affair in the end, but Oram were always in the ascendancy and were full value for their five-point victory, 2-10 to 1-8 (ironically, the exact same scoreline by which they had exited the championship). They key to Oram's victory was their insatiable appetite, a gritty determination to bounce back to the middle tier. It was typical of their resolve and fortitude that they emerged victorious despite being reduced to 14 men at the midway stage in the second half. Declan McBennett opened the scoring for Oram with a first-minute point, but the eventual winners were rocked in their boots by a Cremartin goal four minutes later. Tellingly, that was the one and only time the Shamrocks led in the entire match. Dermot McBride quickly restored his side's superiority with a blistering goal and David Sheehy expertly applied the finish to the winners' second major to give Oram a comfortable interval cushion, 2-5 to 1-3. Michael Mone and McBennett extended the lead shortly after the restart and it was all over bar the shouting by the time the game ebbed into its final quarter. Even though full back Justin Mone went for an early shower after picking up a second yellow card, Oram never let Cremartin back into it. The teams scored five points apiece in the second half. It may have been a long time coming (Christmas was only six weeks away!), but Oram's main objective had been achieved. All's well that ends well. Things had (eventually) gone according to plan. From the season's outset, Oram were always fairly confident that they'd go back up. The hope was that it might be through the championship, but things didn't work out that way. Their response to being eliminated from the championship race was superb. They had six games left in the league and won every one of them - as well as the semi-final and final. They stuck to their guns and put the effort in, therefore earning their just rewards. Before the start of the campaign, Oram had brought in a new manager in the person of Inniskeen man Edmund Meegan, who worked closely with a couple of locally-sourced selectors. Towards the end of the year - for the last month or so - Declan McBennett took over training and managed to put a new bite into the sessions, invigorating the team. It was never easy. Losing to Aughnamullen in the championship was a big blow. What compounded that result was the fact that Oram should have won the drawn game (played in Carrickmacross on August 11th). After a slow start in that game, the Saffrons came good to lead by 1-8 to 1-5 at the break and they soon led by seven points thanks to a goal from Dermot McBride and a John Mone point. However, it was Aughnamullen who finished strongest to snatch an unlikely draw. Mick O'Dowd's team made the most of their lucky escape by winning the replay at Donaghmoyne a week later. In their heart of hearts, Oram knew they could have won both games, but they didn't stand on ceremony or sit around feeling sorry for themselves. Of course, they were low and there was some soul searching done. But they came up with all the right answers. Coming into the championship, Oram had a lot of injuries and a few lads were away, but things fell into place nicely as the season progressed. They'll now be hoping to consolidate their newfound intermediate status, as recent years have seen them yo-yoing up and down. They went up as league winners in '95, but went back down at the end of '96 before returning to intermediate fare as junior champions in 1998. Disappointment was palpable in the clubhouse when the Sarsfields came back down last year. Their sojourn in junior football was short-lived this time around, however, and it's a different emotion entirely that's to be savoured in the area at the moment. If the commitment and attitude are as good next term, then Oram should have no problems. Indeed, they could be about to leave junior football well and truly behind them... Oram, 2002 Monaghan Junior Football League Winners: Adrian Bishop; PJ Flanagan, Justin Mone, Mark Mone; Martin Mone, Stephen Mone, Gareth Mone; Dermot McBride (1-0), Declan McBennett (0-3); Conor Brennan, Michael Mone (0-3), Shane Fitzsimons; John Mone (0-2), Tony Graham, David Sheehy (1-2). On the right road Outgoing Oram club chairman Seamus Ward is optimism personified. But given the talent at the club's disposal right now, one can understand where he's coming from. Like many another who meandered their way to pastures outside the football field way too young, Seamus Ward regrets not having played the game for much longer. The outgoing Oram chairman has ploughed a lot of furrows in the world of administration but not nearly as many as he ought to have done when he was young enough and fit enough to don the club jersey. "I quit playing in the mid-eighties when I was only about 26 and I often regretted not playing for longer. They say school days are the best days of your life. I don't know about that but I definitely feel that you can't beat playing and people should play for as long as they can. That's what I would advise any youngster." Seamus fortunately hadn't called time on his career before Oram managed to win the junior championship in 1980. A member of the all-conquering panel that year, Seamus was a keen forward. However as the years past, he found that his vocation lay in helping out the club on the administration front. And, consequently, he has spent a long number of years with Oram's parent committee. In 2001, for instance, he acted out the role of club PRO. For the most part however he contented himself with being a backbencher and a contributor to successive working committees. But how does the role of Chairman compare to other roles he has adopted? How much time and effort needs to go into the job to do it well? "Like a number of jobs in the GAA, the role of Chairman is very time-consuming. It doesn't matter what club you're involved in. The club could be very successful or out of luck. There's no close season really when you're chairman. But there's been a good working committee in Oram for a number of years now and that helps lessen the workload." The very same division of labour ethos that Seamus eludes to has indeed been evident in the club's push to have installed a new training pitch ready in time for the forthcoming season."Most of the work on it has been done on a voluntary basis. A lot of people have chipped in with their time and their expertise and when the job is finished it should prove to be of great benefit to the juveniles and the players at all grades for training." The club can clearly be seen to be pushing ahead to put in place the infrastructure needed to help form the platform for future success. It's very much a case of noses to the grindstone and shoulders to the wheel out Oram way. "We could have done better in the junior championship overall but the team was badly hit by injuries, especially at the time of the match against Corduff. And we had a couple of players who were away on holidays during the championship as well which effected team selection for the Aughnamullen game. "It's a pity we didn't have everyone available for all the matches. When you consider that Dermot McBride was out injured for a while and we had to start the early part of the year without Justin Mone and then Joe Laverty was out all year, then our results wouldn't be that surprising, all things told." However, Seamus admits that he was quite hopeful about the team's prospects in the junior ranks in 2002. The popular chairman believes that the club was unlucky to have experienced the drop last year even if they hit a sustained bad patch during the season. He was encouraged by the team's display in beating local rivals Blackhill in the opening round of the 2002 junior championship. But did Blackhill not kick it away? "They had a lot of wides alright but so did we. All the pressure was on us because we were odds-on favourites to beat them and you could tell that a few of the lads were very nervous going into the game with Blackhill. Blackhill are an up and coming team and so to beat them was a good start to the campaign. I know a lot of their officials and the amount of work they do in Blackhill. They know, like us, that there's no substitute for hard work. There's no magic wand that you can wave to produce good players." Running the rule over his team's win over Blackhill, Seamus accepts that it was a workmanlike display, nothing more, nothing less. As with all local derby matches, the result was all-important. And even though the team had a shaky start in conceding the first three points of the game, Oram showed they had the appetite for the fray; taking Oram's best wallops on the chin before going ahead by a point at the break and then consolidating their advantage thereafter, helped in no small measure by an albeit fortuitous goal by John Mone, and a two point contribution by substitute David Sheehy. Oram's gritty 2-11 to 0-9 win over Blackhill ought to have seen them rewarded with a better draw than they got though. Corduff and Aughnamullen were to stand in their way and a tilt at the final stages of the competition. "At the start of the year, I genuinely felt we had a chance of getting to the final but being drawn against Corduff and Aughnamullen did us no favours. Having to beat anyone of them is hard at the best of times but to have to take on the two of them made things very difficult. And so to the Corduff game in the second round. Oram suffered a massive blow when losing goalkeeper Adrian Bishop through injury just on the stroke of half-time but, ultimately, it was the team's concession of three second half goals which buried their bid for back-to-back wins in the championship. And, of course, the influence of former county star Frank McEnaney didn't go unnoticed by the attendance in Clontibret, including the Oram chairman. "I thought his (McEnaney) workrate and experience made a big difference for them. Dermot McBride had a major job on his hands and done as well as he could and scored a good goal but he (McEnaney) surprised us all with his fitness. I thought we might have battled back to get on level terms when Kevin Flanagan got a goal about ten minutes into the second half to leave just four points in it but Corduff got stronger as the game progressed and definitely deserved to take the points." Later in the middle of August, Aughnamullen lay waiting in the quarter-final in Carrickmacross. Oram gave as good as they got and were unlucky not to have marched on in the championship with a second championship victory under his belt. Indeed Aughnamullen only carved out a 1-13 to Oram's 2-10 draw thanks to a late, late rally which yielded them three unanswered points at the death. Oram had led by 1-8 to 1-5 at the interval. "Once Dermot (McBride) got through for a goal after just a couple of minutes of the restart I thought we were on our way and were in the driving seat to go on and clinch a win. Unfortunately we missed the boat by not finishing them off. "They played a lot better in the second half but we should have had enough left in the tank to edge it. Sadly for Oram, Aughnamullen seemed to learn more from the drawn game and they proceeded to win the replay at Donaghmoyne by 2-10 to 1-8 even though Oram led by a single point at the interval. "Considering how understrength we were, I think we didn't do too badly in the championship. We all knew that Corduff and Aughnamullen were going to be very tight games and that's the way it worked out. Of course the disappointment of the championship exit soon evaporated when the club put together a great run to win the junior football league. It may not have been the championship but it definitely brought a smile to the face of Seamus Ward. Oram fans would like that okay! Tweet

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