This article is from page 84 of the 2009-03-24 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 84 JPG
BARON de Coubertin’s Olympic ideals of “Stronger, Faster, Higher” could well have been borrowed by the other Olympic on Sunday morn- ing — the Shannon version that is, as they sent shock waves around the county in dumping eight times cham- pions and competition favourites Av- enue United out of this year’s Clare Cup race.
“Everything clicked for us,” said manager Jason Stretton afterwards. “We put everything into it and it hap- pened for us,” added the former Clare Cup winner with Newtown.
Conversely, it didn’t happen for Avenue United as their roller coast- er form of the past month contin- ued over a depressing 90 minutes. Dumped out of the cup at the last 16 stage and facing an uphill battle to prevent Bunratty from claiming the league title, 1t could be another trophy-less year for the bluebloods of the Clare game.
Olympic, meanwhile, are now genuine contenders for the cup title, while they’re hot on the heels of cur- rent champions Rock Rovers in the promotion race out of Division 1.
This cup tie effectively turned seis- mically in Olympic’s favour in the first half — a chance missed at one end by Avenue and an amazing goal
down the other end by Olympic.
Opportunity knocked for the home side after 25 minutes when star at- tacker Mikey Mahony burst into the area — on another day Mahony would have applied a clinical finish, but on this day he was thwarted by Kieran McCarthy.
From Avenue’s point of view this miss was compounded 15 minutes later when Wayne Regan whipped a right footed inswinging corner from the left all the way into the top corner of the net beyond the flailing arms of Colin Smyth.
It was a hammer blow, but one Av-
enue looked like recovering from when they dominated the early ex- changes of the second half. Ten min- utes in Eamon O’Reilly was denied by the crossbar, while in the resulting scramble the ball was cleared off the line.
It was as close as Avenue came to
levelling things up — the Olympic defence in which Paul O’Connor and Jan Hogan were outstanding soaked up everything Avenue could throw at them before they broke out of de- fence and struck for the all-important second goal ten minutes from time.
With centre-forward James Fit- zgerald causing Avenue endless problems, a second goal was always likely, but in the end a mistake by Eamon O’Reilly let in Ray Quigley who skipped past a few defenders be- fore rolling the ball underneath Co- lin Smyth to book Olympic’s quarter- final place.