‘When you get a jersey from one to 15 it’s a great honour’
Coaches sometimes go on about motivating the players under their charge, but after a brief chat with Mark Molloy it's clear he and his colleagues will be totally fired up to win Sunday's SHC final against Ratoath.
There is, the Trim midfielder points out, the small matter of making up for last year's slip up by his team when they were unexpectedly defeated by Ratoath in a semi-final encounter.
Molloy talks about how the "hurt" from that setback is fuelling his team's desire to regain the Jubilee Cup this time around. Harbouring, nursing that hurt will, he hopes, help his team in a game where small margins are sure to have big consequences.
"Losing last year's semi-final is a massive motivation for us. We meet again this year and while Ratoath will be hot favourites we're hopeful we can reach our potential and get the result we seek."
At 37 (he looks much younger) Molloy is one of the more seasoned campaigners in the Trim camp yet he is chosen game-in game-out to man the team's engine room.
Originally from Wexford, illness has kept Molloy out of the team from time to time in recent seasons but he has fought back to earn his place with the kind of dedication to the cause that is exemplary.
When it comes to giving the proverbial 110 per cent, battling for every ball, nobody gives more than Molloy.
He knows what it takes to beat Ratoath in a senior county final. He was part of the Trim side that overcame the blue and golds in the 2020 decider (which because of Covid wasn't played until August 2021).
It was a bone-crushing, memorable encounter - epic was another favourite term used to describe it - with Trim's resolve tested to the full but they won 1-26 to 1-25 after extra-time with Alan Douglas clipping over a point late in extra-time. It was Trim's first SHC crown since 2001.
Now Douglas - who recently returned to the Trim ranks after a spell abroad - and the team is once more poised take on Ratoath in a final that may or may not produce the dramatics of three years ago.
"It was great for Meath hurling to show how high the standard was in the county in that final, it was a epic game and we had to dig deep to get over the line by a point in the end," Molloy recalls.
Reflecting on this year's campaign Molloy says in some games Trim have gone close to their full potential. On other occasions they have fallen short. In all that there is a lesson, a moral for him to take on board. The kind of lesson winners absorb and learn from.
The team, he suggests, set their own standards and don't like to fall below them. That's important. So is the ability to respond to setbacks, and encouragingly for Molloy, Trim have done that.
"We had a good win against Kildalkey in the first round, then beat Dunderry well but after that our formed dipped a bit. We got beaten by Kilmessan this year. We defeated Dunboyne and Clann na nGael but probably didn't meet our own expectations in those games. That defeat to Kilmessan especially was a tough pill to swallow. We knew we had to get back to the drawing board quickly.
"It definitely brought us back down to earth. We know we're not the finished article. Any given team can beat us if we don't perform, it's about getting the best out of the 15 players who start plus the five subs who come on.
"There's 30 lads in our panel and they're all pushing hard for places so when you get a jersey from one to 15 it's a great honour to represent the town and it will be the same against Ratoath on Sunday, subs who have come on in other games have been hugely influential in getting us over the line. We are hoping for more of the same on Sunday."
Motivation. There's no shortage of the stuff among the Trim ranks - or in Mark Molloy's full-on approach.