Athy Stalwart Hits Back At All The Doubters In Fantastic Kildare Final Speech

October is always county final season and with that comes the traditional winners speech. There's always a few standard things to tick off. Thank the defeated opposition, the officials, your own management and all within the club for their support all year.

There is also one obligatory thing, you must tell everybody, that you were given no chance, you were "written off". Now whether you actually were written off is another thing, it doesn't really matter because chances are those thirty or so players will believe they were written off. You only have to go back to Dessie Hutchinson claiming that eleven-in-a-row chasing Ballygunner were written off in Waterford last year to see that there doesn't need to be much logic to the thinking.

But in Kildare with Naas chasing five titles in a row and Athy listed at 4/1 with the bookmakers, maybe captain David Hyland had a point.

That feeling of being written off was obviously very close to the front of David Hyland's mind when he was handed the microphone and he wanted to make sure everybody in Newbridge was aware of it.

The bookies had us at 4/1, the Leinster Council felt the need to set the fixture for 2 weeks time for Baltinglass and Naas and The Nationalist felt the need to publish an article at the end of July asking why we bother playing the Dermot Burke Cup at all. There's an old saying, they wrote us off but guess what, we didn't write back.

After the game, Hyland also spoke to Clubber TV about how he was feeling having broken Naas's grip on the Dermot Burke cup.

Deadly, obviously there's so much pent up emotion, it's a climax you're building up going around in the parade and you've so much pent up emotion so it's great to let it out. I was very confident we'd bring our best but after that you don't know if that's good enough.