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\u201cI know myself, one of my wee boys wasn\u2019t well before Christmas and you\u2019re up to high doe, you didn\u2019t wanna miss training. He was like \u2018cub, go and be with your family, your family needs you\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s just a great man at putting your mind at ease and leaving you that there\u2019s no stress with him. He\u2019s always looking out for the player, he\u2019s always got the player\u2019s best interests at heart, and that\u2019s a very special thing to have.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Kilcoo manager Mickey Moran before the Ulster quarter-final.<\/p>\n
Source: Laszlo Geczo\/INPHO<\/p>\n
Did you always have it in your head to get him up to lift the cup?<\/p>\n
\u201cI promised him I was sending him up them steps. I was not leaving there until he came up them steps. That was it. We would have give up our All-Ireland medal, every medal we had, to make sure Mickey Moran had managed a team to an All-Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s just a wonderful man. Some of the things he\u2019s done in Gaelic football, some of the lives he\u2019s touched, some of the careers he\u2019s been involved in, he\u2019s a very special man. It\u2019s a very fitting tribute that he got up them steps.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, if someone said \u2018you won an All-Ireland title\u2019, I\u2019d think \u2018Mickey Moran managed a club to an All-Ireland title\u2019. That\u2019s where I am in my thinking. It\u2019s him first. For us as players, we were more happy for him today than ourselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd he\u2019ll be the complete opposite, he wouldn\u2019t want to come up them steps, he\u2019s not into that. But there was no way he wasn\u2019t coming up. That\u2019s why we never lifted it until he came up.\u201d<\/p>\n
You\u2019re going down the coaching line yourself, what\u2019s the single biggest thing you learned from him?<\/p>\n
\u201cIf my players were able to think of me the exact same way that players think of Mickey Moran, you\u2019d be doing something right. Yes it\u2019s about winning and things like that, but it\u2019s much deeper than that with him.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s the kind of manager players just adore, and whenever you love your manager, you\u2019ll go to places you never would have gone before. It\u2019s how simple he keeps things. It\u2019s not blood and thunder all the time, probably not until half-time today.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople would say is he a manager, is he a coach, but he\u2019s just everything rolled into one. He\u2019s a special man.\u201d<\/p>\n
What does it mean for you to win the All-Ireland at this stage of your career?<\/p>\n
\u201cTime was running out, like. I knew that myself. To have my wee boys running on the field after it and the smiles on their faces\u2026 It\u2019s the box done. You can lie in bed tonight and know that all the suffering, all the heartbreak, you can just lie and smile tonight.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can go tomorrow and just be satisfied. Because we never were, never in our whole life. Even after Down championships, you had Ulster and then you got beat. I\u2019m playing 20 years and at the end of every year, there\u2019s heartbreak.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no heartbreak tomorrow. There\u2019s only a smile tomorrow morning because there\u2019s no next day out. We\u2019ve done it. We\u2019ve reached the Holy Grail.\u201d<\/p>\n
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CONOR LAVERTY WAS one of the last men to emerge from Kilcoo\u2019s dressing room on Saturday night. Kilcoo\u2019s Conor Laverty celebrates at the end of the game. Source: Ken Sutton\/INPHO He walked out with his gearbag in one hand and a glint in his eye. Almost 20 years after he made his senior debut for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}