Conlon glad to finally gain some home comfort
NIALL Conlon was prepared to give referee Noel McKenna the benefit of the doubt in the aftermath of a remarkable game at The Grove on Saturday.
The Kildare man sent off 10 players and issued over 20 cards in total as a game that started out tamely enough spiralled out of control in the second-half.
McKenna did get a number of calls right, penalising a couple of blatant strikes and coming down hard on indiscipline, but Conlon felt he maybe could have let the game develop a bit before flashing the yellow cards early on.
‘I’m playing 11 or 12 years now and I can safely say that is the craziest game I have ever played in. It was nip and tuck and it’s a good job the ref didn’t have to give away the cards because he’d be out a fortune replacing them.
‘But he has a hard job. At the end of the day there’s only three of them with the two linesmen and there’s 30 lads running around. But look, I think he probably shot the gun a bit early on. Obviously he’s not from either county and he doesn’t know any of the players. Maybe he tried to lay a marker down, but it was a rough, windy day on a wet pitch and he maybe could have been a bit more lenient on either side in the conditions.’
The refereeing aside Conlon insisted the only way was up for O’Connell’s after a poor first-half showing and his goal early in the second-half gave them the lead for the first time and something to protect.
‘We were four points down and we dug in and got it back before half-time. We were up against a gale force wind.
‘Sean Cairns levelled it up just before half-time and even though we were down to 13 we got in and re-grouped. We knew we hadn’t played well enough and didn’t keep our discipline.
‘I thought we came out and started the second-half well and we knew if we got the ball down and played a bit we could punish them. When we did get it down and played it snappy some of the play was excellent.’
O’Connell’s will be at home again in the quarter-finals with new Meath champs Curraha up next at The Grove, and after a year and half without a home win, Conlon and his colleagues will be hoping to make it two in a row.
‘We were having a laugh and joke during the week that we were looking for our first victory at The Grove in about 18 months. We beat the Pat’s in the 2016 league in Division 1 and we hadn’t won a game here since. So that was the target today, to finally get that monkey off our back. So we just put our shoulder to the wheel today and got the result,’ he added.