By dint of his consistent displays over the years, Keith Daly has enamoured himself to club supporters and team-mates alike. A Player of the Year award reflected his standing among his peers. Kevin Carney reports. With such a small catchment area, Rockcorry GFC is faced with the perennial task of trying to make the very best with whatever material it has at its disposal. The problem for Rock' and its 'ilk is that any shortcomings, structural or personnel-wise, are cruelly punished. Too few players meeting (Roy) Keanesque standards, a plethora of injuries, too little experience, too many suspensions - it can all add up to frustration heaped upon frustration. Just ike winning can become a habit, losing can become like a ball and chain which becomes impossible to shake off. As anyone among the green and white brigade will readily testify, the slippery slope accomodates all sorts and for any length of time. But unlike the ultra-manicured, pampered world of professional sport, planet GAA breeds degrees of resilience, loyalty and ambition in players which always seem to get hard-pressed units of the Association past the stickiest of wickets. Rock's Keith Daly has helped his club through a cluster of difficulties, an all-too common smattering of hard times in recent years. By awarding him the club's 2004 Player of the Year trophy his peers acknowledged as much. "It was nice to get it but I'd have swapped a half-a-dozen of them for a medal," Keith avers. Truth is, the tigerish defender isn't far off having a half-a-dozen such mementoes on the mantlepiece in his Gaelic games-made household. Keith has been one of Rock's most consistent performers on the field of play and most committed clubmen over the last seven or eight years. Even the dogs in the flower-bedecked village know that. But while 2004 went pretty well for him (club insiders would tell you it still wasn't his best-ever season), Keith's guage for a good/bad season stands and falls on the back of what success was reaped by the club. As such, 2004 was, in his estimation, another season of what-might-have-been. As is his wont, Keith reflects on the club's past couple of seasons with the same sort of honesty and passion that colours his match-by-match displays. "Things didn't happen for us in 2004 or last year either. "There's been a general lack of commitment by the players as a whole, especially in the past year, and we've fallen well short of expectations at the start of the last few years. "Then at the start of this year ('05) expectations weren't great and our results didn't surprise anyone at the club really." A championship quarter-final defeat to Clones in 2004 had an all too familiar feeling of deja vu about it for Keith and co. A hat-trick of championship triumphs by the St. Tighernach Park-based crew rubbed salt into Rock's sometimes gaping wound. The words Scotshouse and defeat have been twinned round Rock' way these past three years. Keith's painful memories of the Clones setbacks are almost tangible. "Losing the replay to them in 2004 was very hard to accept," the eager-beaver centre-back says. "We totally dominated them and controlled the play in the first half but we must have kicked about a dozen wides that day. "They got a goal against the run of play and that was it. We didn't score for the last ten minutes or so whereas they put on a bit of a show and won by a couple of points." Against a less than vaunted Clones side, the Rock lads failed again, again and again to crack it. Keith suspects that their neighbours had more than a slither of inside information to bolster their efforts. "Gerry McFarland was with Clones at the time but had been over us and he knew us inside out and that definitely worked to their advantage. "But the bottom line though was that we under-performed as a team and had only ourselves to blame really." A well-heeled career has seen him star at college level with St. Macartan's and at underage level for club and county in times past. However it's his career statistics of a far more recent vintage that concentrates his mind most of all. 2005 was, sadly, another bitterly disappointing year with a sojourn in the US failing to dilute the negativity of another year of under-achievement. His trip across the Atlantic straddled run-outs in the championship against Donaghmoyne, Cremartin and Clones with an all-too familiar end-story. The club's championship travails were mirrored by similar hard-luck stories on the league front. "We must have had nearly twelve lads suspended over the year which didn't help, including three sent off at home against Emyvale, and which weakened us during the year "The game against Emyvale was vital because we were lying third from bottom of the table at that stage and badly needed the points. "We had beaten Doohamlet and Eire Og before the Emyvale game but the way things worked out, Aghabog won their last eight games which meant that we went down once Donaghmoyne beat us." The fact that Rock' beat Doohamlet by four points late in the season when the latter topped the table proved that the village outfit had the ability to beat the best of the rest 'on their day'. "Those days don't come along often enough though," Keith reminds us. Of course, with players based away in places like Drogheda and Dublin and having to already work of a small panel - sometimes reduced by injuries and suspensions - it can often be the case that while the harvest is rich the number of labourers can be few. It all makes for trying times for all associated with the Cavan-border club. And yet Keith reckons that Rock' aren't that far away from being able to crack it at junior level and make their way back up to intermediate grade in double quick time. With a bit more experience and a bit more physical strength, the current Rock side has the potential to match the achievement of Rock teams from the late nineties which made it to an intermediate championship semi-final (only to lose to Sean McDermotts after a replay) under the management of Pascal Smyth. "There's a lot of talk about the fellas who've done well at minor level over the last couple of years and if they can make the step to adult level fairly quickly then there's no reason why we can't get back up to intermediate straight away. There has been some variation in Rockcorry's style of play in recent years but Keith hopes that the club's traditional 'running' game will be adhered to. "I think it's what suits us best and it's the type of game I prefer anyway," he says. In the next few weeks, Keith will see himself preparing to play junior football for the first time in his career but, he says, with all due respects to those normally resident in that sphere, he earnestly hopes that his beloved club spends as little time as possible there. "All you can hope for is that we'll be better next year than we were in 2005. "We're capable of winning something at junior level. There's no reason why we can't win either the league or the championship next year. Currin will be coming down but the fact that Rock' beat the Scotshouse team were beaten in Rockcorry signifies the type of potential inherent in the green and whites. "If the commitment is there next year, we have a chance of getting our hands on some silverware." Watch this space. Tweet

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