No excuses after abject Reds display
‘OUR performance wasn’t good enough,’ Louth manager Kierans lamented in the aftermath of his side’s defeat to Leitrim in Dowdallshill on Sunday.
The result all but confirms Louth will be playing Division 4 football next season.
With two games left and both Tipperary and Leitrim on three points and each other to play, Louth need to win their remaining two games and hope those two mentioned teams join them on four points come final day. Plus Louth will still need to have the healthiest score difference out of the three. That is the only permutation available to Louth.
Kierans couldn’t hide his disappointment the manner of his side’s loss in the ‘do or die’ battle. ‘It was poor really, he said. ‘In some of the other games you could make the case and say we played well in patches, but today there was very very little you could say that was at the required standard. It was nowhere near good enough.’
So abject was the performance from his side, the game reminded Kierans of the worrying Qualifier exit to Antrim last summer.
‘Reminds me a little bit of Antrim last year,’ Kierans revealed.
‘Which is the first time I could say that we didn’t finish the game with any fight at all. Even in Derry last week we finished reasonably strong, so that’s a worry. It’s something we definitely have to talk about during the week.
‘Our kickouts went, our defensive play was poor in the last 10 minutes when we should have closed up shop. All things that definitely could go wrong, went wrong.’
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Louth had lined up fellow strugglers Leitrim from a long way out and even had the venue changed from the maligned Gaelic Grounds in order to try and potentially shift favour in the Wee County’s way.
‘We thought we’d get a boost from getting out of a difficult pitch,’ Kierans explained.
‘Our training went well all week, we tried to change a few things around in terms of personnel, in terms of the shape of the team and the reality was, it didn’t work.
‘Defensively we weren’t at the races at all really, one v one and our whole defensive situation was poor. So they had a lot of chances and lucky enough they take them, but looking at ourselves going forward, I think we kicked eight wides in the first half which is not good either.
‘We’re certainly not scoring enough,’ Kierans continued.
‘I did think we had a few goal chances in the second half. Liam
Jackson had one, Sam had one, Ger McSorley had a half chance. We worked on that, certainly the slickness in our attack, but it comes down to the defence attributes of the other side. They were really intense, closed up, same as Derry last week, loads of pressure, loads of bodies, and it’s something we’ve tried to do, but we certainly didn’t get it right today.’
Louth will gladly take some reprieve over the next 10 days before they embark on the trip to unbeaten Cork the following weekend. Kierans will look to iron a few things out first.
‘We going to try and address this kind of performance today for a start,’ Kierans insisted.
‘No pressure on trip to Cork, just the pressure we put on ourselves now to try and get a performance and look forward to the medium term, to the Championship. Because for Championship football we are not anywhere near the correct level at the minute.’