The Referee
Clarifying from the start, that I’m not blaming a referee for a win, loss or draw,
it's a lazy excuse, and switches our focus away from ourselves and management for reason and cause of the teams outcome good or bad!!
On the record, he was bad for both sides.
Midfield
From the initial Eye test you could see Physically, Derry were more imposing. PJ McCloskey and Patsy Bradley are robost in their general play anyway without even trying to be overly physical.
but, it was not a
simple 2 on 2 problem...or a missing PK problem
We couldn't get
on the breaking ball.
As we had to kick the ball out in the first half against the wind they broke the ball back into our half over and over again winning breaks and if they didn't win it they got a free, it just put us under pressure over and over again.
Even if Paddy was there I don't think he could have stemmed the tide but obviously, his general synergy about the field and leadership was missed.
I missed the Armagh game and one change I noticed from the Wexford game is, Gally was trying to work the kickouts abit better, it resulted in Ronan Carroll breaking to the wing collecting first hand possession. So, that is an improvement going forward but why did we stop doing it?
The Sending off
Although I didn't see the alleged incident, I seen the start of the tangle, no need for it and Mark knows better. Hopefully he'll come back stronger.
I actually followed the play on further where, Ciaran Byrne kicked a beauty in the right corner, shame majority of the crowd didn't get to see it.
Mental lapse, Again
In this division we will look back and say our downfall was our mental frailty.
Silly free's that give the opposition easy scores are never going to go away but as a unit and bunch, our mental toughness has cost us points.
Either we go ahead and do not possess the capacity to keep the foot on the throttle and finish the opposition off.....(Westmeath Laois)
We leave ourselves too much to do too frequently
(Wexford, Derry and Armagh but we got the win)
We got the perfect start yesterday and then switched off and let Derry go up the field and get a penalty.
Another aspect of our lack of this lack of mental toughness is as soon as we seem to get to the summit we just stop, that might have a lot to do with leaving ourselves with too much to do......like yesterday, we scored 7 points in a row to level the game then we just couldn't mentally get that bit more to win. The same with the Wexford game.
Sure, we showed great character for getting back into the game and the Wexford game.
but we shouldn't be getting praise for letting teams get so far ahead in the first place.
Survival
It all comes down to the 7th of April against Longford at home.
Which, we would have snapped your hand off if we were offered it before the league began.
It will test our mental toughness yet again....
we will be favourites to stay up,
we might go ahead,
we might leave ourselves with alot to do...
Maybe the past mistakes were there to test us and prepare us for this game and hopefully championship.
Two weeks time will tell whether we have learned from them or not because, we're going down if we haven't.
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