Senan Kilbride: From Abu Dhabi to Connacht glory at 40
St. Brigid's team celebrate with the Connacht club championship trophy.(Image: ©INPHO/Dan Clohessy)The drizzle at Dr Hyde Park comes down in a mist so fine it feels like breath. It hung in the air on Sunday afternoon, soft and familiar, the kind of weather that doesn’t stop anything in Roscommon because it’s part of everything. And there, in the middle of it, stands Senan Kilbride—40 years old, boots soaked, jersey clinging, and smiling the smile of someone who has somehow found his way back to a place he didn’t expect to see again.You can hear it in his voice. Relief. Disbelief. Joy.A man who has spent five years under desert sun now blinking in the Roscommon rain, wondering how in God’s name he ended up here again, holding a fifth Connacht medal he never thought he'd touch. “It felt like robbery in 2006,” he says, referring to the first Connacht title that he and his club St Brigid's won, when a stoppage time goal from Karol Mannion sent them to a one-point victory over Corofin.“And again today… I don’t know how we won that game (against Moycullen).”That’s the thing about days like Sunday —they don’t happen because you plan for them. They happen because football, like life, sometimes gives you the breaking ball when you least expect it.Long before Sunday's Connacht final win over Moycullen, before the comeback, before the flight home from Abu Dhabi where he was working, Kilbride had accepted that his days at the business end of Gaelic football were finished.He had given St Brigid’s everything: 11 county titles, five Connacht crowns, All-Ireland glory in 2013, and the kind of years that leave your bones humming long after you’ve stopped playing.He left for Abu Dhabi with a clear conscience and a full heart, thinking he’d played his last meaningful minutes back in 2020.But football has a way of calling you home. This season he was playing junior football, no more than that, running around for the love of it. “No expectations,” he says now. Then came the phone call—from Anthony Cunningham, the same man who had guided Brigid’s to their first Connacht title in 2006, the beginning of everything. A manager in his second spell, reaching out to a player in the twilight of his life on the field.A break here, an opening there, and suddenly the door was no longer closed. Kilbride started training. A few weeks only, but the body felt good, surprisingly good. And so he slipped back in. First as a late sub in the drawn county final against Padraig Pearses. Then as a starter in the replay, slotting into a link-man role, scoring a point, finding old rhythms that had never fully left him. You don’t forget how to play football like he played it—strong and smart.Now here he was, in another Connacht final, in the dying winter light, watching Ruaidhri Fallon—man of the match in the Connacht semi-final and now the hero again—smash a breaking ball into the net to steal a game Moycullen had owned for long stretches. “Only for that, it was looking like a lost cause,” Kilbride says. “We got lucky with a few breaks. I’m just delighted we got away with it.”Although they got lucky on Sunday, St Brigid’s is a club that knows heartbreak. The 2011 All-Ireland final lost to Crossmaglen. The All-Ireland semi-final defeat the year after to Athlone neighbours, Garrycastle. And then, most recently, the 2023 All-Ireland defeat to Glen which had the kind of ending that settles deep into your chest and stays there.Maigh Cuilinn's Aidan Claffey and Brian Stack of St. Brigid's (Image: ©INPHO/Dan Clohessy)“That hurt drives you on,” Kilbride says. “We’ve been through all this before.” He speaks about it like a man describing weather patterns. Hurt comes, you learn to endure it. Loss arrives, you train anyway. You show up again and again until the tide turns or you run out of years.It takes time to appreciate how strange this year has been for him: drifting home from Abu Dhabi, settling back into Ireland, slipping quietly into junior football, then being lifted, almost without noticing, onto the biggest stage again. A player retired at 31 from inter-county football because of injury and fatigue now finding something like rebirth at 40. “It has been a rollercoaster,” he says. “But I wouldn’t change it.”The details of Sunday's match swirl around him like the mist. Poor first half. Conor Hand keeping them alive with five points from play, including a two-pointer that changed the mood going into the break.The midfield struggles. Moycullen’s structure. Fingertip blocks in the second half, bodies thrown, chances denied. And the save—Conor Carroll stretching to stop Fionn McDonagh with fifteen minutes left.St. Brigid's supporter James Halpin enjoying a tea ahead of the game(Image: ©INPHO/James Lawlor)“A massive moment,” Kilbride says. “If they score there, the whole thing flips.”This is how tight these games are—how fragile. A touch, a bounce, a breath. It’s why old players come back, even when they think they’re done. Because there is nothing in the world like the feeling of being inside one of these moments, of being part of a collective will bent against the odds.“It takes everyone,” he says. “Subs, blocks, breaks… and a bit of luck as well.”There is something about watching a man return to himself. Something about seeing a player who thought his story was finished realise, suddenly, that the book was still open.Where would he rather be?“You would not want to be anywhere else in the world,” he says, eyes scanning the grey sky and the green field and the men in Brigid's shirts celebrating around him.And maybe that’s the truth of it—maybe all the flights, all the years, all the injuries and distances and days spent far from here have led him back to this one wet Sunday, where the rain is soft, the medal is real, and the story, somehow, is still being written.Click here to sign up to our sport newsletter, bringing you the top stories and biggest headlines from Ireland and beyond
