Ford focussed on club championship

HE has played and managed on the big stage and even won an Irish boxing title in The National Stadium, but there's nothing that fires Peter Ford's heart like the maroon and yellow of his native Ballinrobe.
The former Mayo full-back and captain, who managed Sligo and Galway at inter-county level before taking charge of Castlebar Mitchels, Ballintubber and Breaffy returned to his home club for another stint at the start of last year.
His ambition? To win a first Sweeney Cup since 2002.
In the minutes after Ballinrobe's win in the recent Michael Walsh Intermediate Cup final in Kilmeena he spoke to his team in the dressing-room and then emerged to speak with The Mayo News with a smile on his face.
“It's nice to win silverware. We hadn't won a cup before this since the 2013 O'Mara Cup final, so it's nice to win this one. We lost the final of this competition last year to Parke and I don't think the lads realised at the time the importance of winning a final, no matter what competition it is,” he added before being asked if his team were timing their championship preparations just right.
“We won't know how well we've timed our run until the final whistle blows in Newport at the end of the first game. We've had a good enough season. We were missing a lot of lads at different times of the year. We have eight Leaving Certs in the squad so we were missing them for a lot of the time with exams and holidays and things like that. We picked up a lot of injuries too and we had lads abroad, so it has taken a bit of time to gel everything together. The most we had at training up to now was 16 and usually its 10 or 12 because the intermediate lads train on their own, so it was hard enough going, but it's coming together now and we should be fresh for the championship.”
Ford has a number of players returning to action for championship, including former Mayo minor captain Diarmuid Duffy, Evan Reaney, Joe Burke and Kevin Quinn. They will surely add to Ballinrobe's chances of success but Ford explained there was just one ingredient required.
“When we work hard we'll give anyone a game and we showed that tonight in the second half, so we have to do that more consistently,” he added before projecting forward to the championship challenge awaiting.
“There are so many teams with a chance of winning it. It could be anyone, so there's no point in predicting anything. All I can say is we'll have a cut at each game and see where that takes us.
Championship is everything. Nothing else matters. If you win the championship you've had a brilliant season, if you don't you haven't.
“Kilmeena beat us in the quarter-final last year in a really good game. They were marginally better than us and deserved to win. I hope we've learned a bit since last year but we won't know that 'til the ball is thrown in in Newport.”