Long serving James McGrail finally wins his first Leitrim SFC medal after four final heartbreaks
As famines go, not winning a Connacht Gold Leitrim SFC title since 2013 hardly qualifies as a prolonged period of suffering but for James McGrail, St Mary’s victory over Mohill last year was a special moment as he won his first Senior Championship medal after losing four finals.
With an incredibly young team, James is one of the few veterans on the team but Sunday’s victory was particularly sweet: “It is a long time since we won, back in 2013 - I actually wasn’t around, I was in Australia so it is my first medal playing so it is just an unbelievable result.”
So what kept bringing James back to the coalface, suffering heartbreaks as they did in 2020: “For the likes of myself, Nicholas, Barry Butler, Brian O’Donnell, the older guys that are there, the young lads give you energy and it keeps you going. Definitely, your time will come someday but if you can keep matching those boys in training, you know you’re well able to play against any other team in Leitrim.”
Those young boys are the source of hope that St Mary’s can go on to dominate in the years ahead but it was the lessons of 2020 that proved crucial in Sunday’s victory: “The club is going in the right direction, I had been in four county finals and I lost all of them before today.
“But I knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time with the group of lads that are coming through from the U17s up and what has come through already. We were here in 2020, we were disappointed with that but the boys are another year or two older and you can just see, they are animals - they are getting bigger and stronger and they are a really good team.”
Nicholas McWeeney and others pointed to James’ words at halftime as inspiring the team but the man himself spoke of a laser focus: “What we said at halftime was we needed the next point, it didn’t matter who was going to get it, just get the next point and the next one after that and the next thing it was back to three. We just had a bit of momentum and that was it, we kept going.
“When you’re out there, you don’t realise what is going on, you’re that focused. It was just one point, one point - we started winning the ball around midfield and I think we had five ten minutes there where we capitalised on their kickout and it was back level. The young lads have it in the legs, they just kept going.”
His final came to a premature end with a black card and James admitted he feared the worst as Mohill searched for an equaliser: “I wasn’t watching, I had my head down in my hands” said James of those final minutes, “I was just waiting for Mark to blow it up and I saw it coming back to one point and I was thinking it was going to happen again, it was going to be a draw game but we got the win, today was our day.”
A Connacht Club campaign now awaits and James is eager for it, once the celebrations have died down! “We’ll go out and celebrate tonight and tomorrow and whatever. Alan and the boys said to us already, we’re going to get over this, we’ll go out and celebrate and we’re going to knuckle down. You get your clap on the back, you’ll take it and then get back to training and we’ll have a pop at these boys in London.”