It took a while for things to calm down around Strokestown after last month’s county final.
A first Roscommon senior title win in 20 years, secured by the left boot of stoppage time substitute Tony Lavin – his right quad was in tatters, so he improvised and swung his foot left at it – brought life locally to a standstill.
“Ah, pandemonium, just pandemonium for the Sunday, and the Monday...and then a few of the die-hards were still at it on the Tuesday,” smiled their experienced forward Colin Compton.
If you’d dared to suggest temperance in the middle of all that, with a nod to the Connacht club championship, you’d have gotten short shrift.
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“I’d have said I don’t want to know about it,” admitted Compton.
Ambition doesn’t stand still for long though and the former Roscommon attacker joined his teammates on the following Saturday morning to sweat out their excesses. To a man, they all turned up.
They have remained hard at it since and, a month on from the county final, will head to Tuam Stadium on Sunday to take on a Moycullen side fresh from hammering Westport in the provincial quarter-finals.
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“The management brought us back down to ground,” said Compton. “This is a huge opportunity for us and we want to grasp it. I’m 30, 31 in January, I’m playing with the senior team for 14 years and these opportunities don’t come around too often. We know as a group that when you get into these positions, you have to give it everything you have.”
Compton has done just that for well over a decade, answering his club’s call - and for a while the county’s too - despite working as a member of a Garda Síochána in Dundalk for a long period. It was his work commitments that ultimately forced the 2017 and 2019 Connacht SFC medallist with Roscommon to knock county football on the head.
“I remember Anthony Cunningham asking me back in for the 2020 season and I just didn’t have it in me at the time,” said Compton. “I had a path worn up and down. I just couldn’t commit to it. It’s not only the travelling, it’s all the planning. You have to plan to get people to cover work, trying to look for leave on this or that day.”
Yet he continues to make the sacrifices for his club. Why not simply get a club transfer?
“I’ve always been asked about transferring clubs through the years but at the same time, with the club, you are never going to transfer,” he said. “Your club is where you are from and nothing is going to change that.
“I have actually moved down to Dublin in the last year or so. I am travelling with the lads back to club training. But yeah, for five or six years there in Dundalk I was on my own over and back.”
The Strokestown players pitched up in the local schools in the days after the county final win over Boyle. It brought Compton back in time to 2002 when, after Strokestown’s previous county win, he was in class himself when the local heroes called in.
Maybe it’s a good omen that that group of players went on to contest a Connacht final later that year.
“That was a great Crossmolina team that beat them,” said Compton of the 2002 decider. “It was a serious Crossmolina team and Strokestown gave them lots of it, they weren’t far away. There’s a good pedigree in Roscommon club football. St Brigid’s won a couple of Connacht titles and eventually won an All-Ireland in 2013. Pearses won the Connacht title last year. We’re playing these teams and we’re competing with them and we’re beating them.”
Even Compton will acknowledge that it was a mightily close call against Boyle, though. Lavin had only just come on when he coughed up possession, leading to a free that Boyle struck the equaliser from. Stalemate reigned until Lavin got the ball again and took his pot shot at glory.
“It’s something that I think every club player in the country can take great heart from,” said Compton. “Tony hasn’t really kicked a ball for Strokestown’s senior team in the last two years between injuries and form and a couple of other things here and there, maybe just not getting picked.
“He was really on the outskirts of things and then to come on in the county final with three minutes to go, having not seen a minute of action all year, to kick the winning score off his left foot, considering his right quad was torn, it’s fairytale stuff. It’s a bit of an extraordinary story and something I think a lot of club players around the place would take great heart from.”
