SMITH REAPING BENEFITS OF THE WISE OLD HEADS GUIDING HIS PROGRESS
Consistency was Enda’s achilles heel, but the brains behind Roscommon’s revival have turned his game around
IF it is true that experience is something you gain, when you don’t gain what you want, it’s how you put it to use that matters.
In Roscommon football, they have gained far more experience than victories down through the years, but it’s the wisdom that they are putting to use which shows the tangible valuable of hard lessons well learned.
It was never more clearly illustrated than in last weekend’s performance by Enda Smith, a player whose talent has never been in doubt, but getting the pitch of his performance to a consistent level has.
He produced such a thunderous performance in last year’s Connacht final that he walked off with a Man of the Match gong and an All-Star nomination.
The Boyle man would have got even more had he been able to sustain that form, but his impact in both the drawn and replayed All-Ireland quarter finals took some of the gloss off his Connacht final display.
This year his form has flipped; the Boyle midfielder struggled to get traction in the Connacht final loss to Galway, but he bounced back last weekend to produce one of the great slowburning individual perform his ances of this summer.
In the end, he would literally prove to be the difference between Roscommon and an ever-so-willing Armagh side who pushed them hard in a pulsating match-up.
Firstly, he established a hold on them around the middle as he ruled the skies to take four restarts. Then he torched them on the ground, firing home the two goals in a game which his team would win by six points.
But that performance, which built to such a giddy peak that he was still able to storm through the Armagh defence to net that second goal in injury time, was not sourced in chance but in education.
‘We were talking to Enda after the Galway game and we thought he didn’t manage the Connacht final,’ explains Roscommon coach Liam McHale.
‘We felt he blew a gasket there because he was trying to create too much.
‘He was working his socks off, back defending and trying to be competitive on the kick-out.
‘So, we had a lot of chats with him about just being solid in the first half and saving energy between the two 50s and then going for it in the second.
‘He was awesome. It’s just lovely when you talk to a fella about something and he plays it to the letter of the law.
‘He ended up scoring 2-1 from midfield, which is brilliant.
‘He was so happy and we all were because he has that sort of skill.
‘You could see that in the Connacht final, but he just tried too hard.
‘As an ex-midfielder myself, I know you can’t do everything for 70 minutes,’ adds McHale. That is just one
example of how Roscommon’s Mayo management team of McHale and his brother-in-law manager Kevin McStay are using hardearned experience to ease Roscommon down the All-Ireland series road. In their three-year reign, they have made the top eight of the League and Championship twice but this, by a distance, is their biggest achievement because they intend to take lessons from the games, especially those that don’t go in their favour. And getting to a place like tonight where they get to play against Tyrone at Croke Park as equals is as much about relief as it is pleasure for McHale. He admits to fearing the worst in the immediate aftermath of the Connacht final, when they were caught down the home strait by a battle-hardened Galway team. ‘For a young team like ours trying to make the breakthrough a provincial title can be everything, and everyone knows that the AllIreland is a bit too far away. ‘So I was very worried about that because they would have targeted winning back-to-back Connacht titles and that not doing it would take a lot out of them, which it did.
‘It took them a while to regroup and, thankfully, we had three weeks to do that. You could see that there was a lot of enthusiasm about them.
‘We really wanted it. We felt that it was very important for the development of this team to get into the Super 8s and compete — that is the only way you will learn, playing the Tyrones and Dublins.
‘You don’t want to be in the Canary Islands or at home sitting down watching them,’ added the Roscommon coach.
It amounts to validation of the players’ ability and the management’s nous that they have it made this far.
Apart from getting Smith to tailor his performance so that the best was kept for last, against Armagh they also picked their team to ensure old heads would show the way.
Seanie McDermott and Cathal Cregg — the latter’s influence extending far beyond the three points he scored — had a profound impact in a rollercoaster ride which demanded that all involved lived on their nerves.
‘We knew Armagh were a very good side and we were a bit worried about it so we introduced two veterans into the team, one on the half-back line and one on the full-forward line, to hopefully give us a bit of stability.
‘I thought Seanie Mac and Cathal did a great job.
‘And then we got some young lads in there as well in the likes of Gary Patterson who can move fairly well and we finished off the game very well.’
And they intend to carry on as they left off. Their win over Armagh, despite all that was at stake, was fashioned in a thrilla-minute contest that was candy for the eyes.
‘We’re not going to change our approach,’ vows McHale.
‘We play the way we play. We try to move the ball quickly and score heavily. We will try to entertain our fans and see where it takes us.
‘We feel that down the road, if we keep playing that way that these young fellas will be able to compete with the Dublins and the Galways.
‘Mayo have proven it in the last few years that the only way to compete with the Dublins of this era is to get in their faces and that is what we are gearing towards.’
‘We had a lot of chats with him about being solid’ ‘We knew Armagh were good and we were worried’