McCaffrey pays a harsh penalty

DESPITE scoring twice, Gareth McCaffrey’s thoughts following Drogheda’s 3-2 defeat on Friday night were very much centred around his penalty miss.

The 22-year-old had the chance straight after the restart to pull Drogheda level but his spot kick was saved. Having scored from the spot against Finn Harps the week previous, the striker was the preferred penalty taker at Stradbrook.

‘On a very personal note it’s good [to score twice], especially when you come back to an old club and score it kind of gets the monkey off your back but to be honest my thoughts are with the penalty that I missed. And probably my overall performance could have improved as well so the over-riding feeling is of disappointment,’ exy explained McCaffrey (right).

Both his goals had one key similarity, positioning. While the first may have been a gift the second was all about awareness and his s position.

‘I know you have to be in the positions, but there has to be a decent bit of luck involved. But if you’re not in the positions you can’t score. Obviously for the first one I had to gamble and then for the second Mark Doyle did excellently, he has been fantastic for the first four games this season and carried that on tonight, he’s probably one of our best players. I think if I had of missed from there it would have really summed up a bad night for me so luckily that wewent in as well.’ PPlaying up front witwith Lee Duffy, it was notable hhow much possession they were both ggetting and hhow much of the pitch they werwere covering. ‘ThaThat’s what the gaffer loolooks for and the demand that you have to put on yourself, but I think, as a team there were maybe a couple of decisions that we could have made better and had more of an influence on the game. Once again, the penalty, if that goes in it’s 2-2 and a completely different game and then maybe we go on and win it.’

The injury to Stephen McGuinness, despite not playing with Drogheda now, brought back memories of his injury last season when he was brought straight to hospital. McCaffrey said former team-mate or not, it’s not nice to see those things.

‘It’s never nice, former teammate or not, when someone hits the deck like that you’re worried. Obviously I didn’t recognise it at the time, I was more focused with putting the ball in the back of the net which luckily I did. But I just came back to see if the two lads were ok and Stephen was kind of away with the birds and that’s not nice, you never want to see anyone get injured.’

The focus for the team now is firmly on putting this result in the rear view mirror, ‘This game has solidified the fact there won’t be any easy games in this division. But we don’t have time to rest on our laurels, we’ll move on to UCD on Friday night and look to put things right,’ he concluded.