Hatton savouring every opportunity on the big stage

Facing into his fourth SFC final in nine years there is a sense that Summerhill captain Richie Hatton is soaking up the atmosphere of next Sunday’s clash with Simonstown with more enjoyment than he has done before.
Being captain hasn’t brought any extra pressures on the talented centre-back and it isn’t a role he overly thinks about, it’s an honour he can reflect on when the playing days are over - but for now Simonstown is all that’s on his mind.
“I have been captain a couple of times before and to be honest I probably took the whole honour for granted a little bit. It is a great honour to be captain, but it is probably something I won’t really treasure as much until I look back on it in years to come,” Hatton told the Meath Chronicle.
“We know we are going to have to turn up with our A game next Sunday to have a chance. We will have to try to stop Simonstown scoring goals, which they are scoring at will at the minute. Simonstown are favourites and rightly so, but we believe that if we turn up with our A game then we will have a good chance.
“It’s a good while ago since Simonstown lost two in a row, but they finally came good last year and they did it in style.
“The same as ourselves, they have a good mix of youth and experience, a couple of really good players and they are definitely the in-form team at the moment. 
“It is not going to be easy getting over the line against them.”
Hatton has been there, done that and worn the t-shirt on several occasions, but reaching the county final is always the aim so for the captain he is delighted to be back in the showpiece of the year and he is hopeful they can use their experience of final in 2008, 2011 and 2013 to good effect next Sunday.
“County finals are never easy to get to no matter how good of a team you have. We are lucky enough that for a certain group of players this will be our fourth county final, but you never take them for granted because they are always hard to get there,” he said.
“We have had success before, but it is a true saying that you have to lose one to win one and that was the case with us.
“We certainly learned from our mistakes against a really good Navan O’Mahonys team in 2008, which at the time was probably one of the strongest ever O’Mahonys teams.
“So we took a lot from that game going into 2011 and while it did take a replay we got there in the end to claim the title.”
So with all that experience under their belt, was Hatton surprised to be back in a final again so soon after blooding new talent in such a short space of time?
“It probably hasn’t been a surprise how well we have done. We have a few very young players, but they have been playing for the last couple of years. A lot of them are still under 21 and are probably only finding their feet in adult football now.
“At the minute we have a good mix of youth and experience and that bodes well for us not just this year, but also looking to the future.
“We knew Wolfe Tones was going to be the last game in the group and we didn’t want to leave our qualification hopes resting on the outcome of that one so we started very determined and set our stall out early and it went well for us.
“We probably had one eye on the quarter-finals going into the Wolfe Tones game, but Wolfe Tones proved how tough they are by winning that game to get them over the line.
“The five day turnaround wasn’t really a problem, but it is easy to say that now because we didn’t pick up any injuries. The month wait before that for the quarter-final was a bigger issue, but we got in a few challenges and we kept ticking over, trying to do our best.”
That best has proven to be good enough so far. Will it be enough next Sunday?