McKeegan thrilled with man of the match award

Adjudicator Billy Henderson plumped for the wicket-keeper, who scored an impressive 53 runs in the Beechgrove men’s second innings and also had four stumpings as they ran out 97 runs winners over Strabane.

“To be honest I would have been happy with a Strabane man getting the man of the match award and us winning the cup,” he conceded.

“My season hasn’t been going the best so I needed to chip in and do something, so I was just happy to do that.

“Whenever I came out to the middle on Saturday, Chris Dougherty helped me massively, he kept telling me to ‘play it straight, play it straight’ and he helped me a lot.

“Because of that help and in my opinion Chris was the man of the match, because he set the platform for the runs to come at the end of the innings.

“Those two big scores in both innings whenever he opened the batting set the platform for us.”

“I was happy with my performance in the final, but its all about the all round team performance at the end of the day.”

McKeegan felt Saturday’s success against a very good Strabane side can only breed confidence throughout the Brigade changing room for the remainder of the 2010 campaign.

“Strabane are a very, very hard team to beat; there batting is probably one of the best batting line-ups in the league apart from Limavady.

“Peter and Mark (Gillespie), their professional Jonathan Beukes, they are very, very hard to get out, they move the ball about very well, so we were just glad to get them out early in the second innings, to be honest that was the key.

“This Saturday like every other match this season is another big game for us and we have to beat Limavady at the weekend to give ourselves any chance of winning the Senior One title, after that we’ll then take each game as it comes.”