Croke Park date a big incentive for O’Connor

PROMOTION was obviously the big prize, the opportunity to slay those painful memories from 2015 was another driving force, but five-point hero Eoin O’Connor had another big incentive to sink Tipp on Sunday.

It was by some distance his best display in a Louth shirt and afterwards the Past’s man revealed that the chance to play in Croke Park was a huge incentive to beat the Premier County in their own backyard.

‘I wasn’t here last year but the boys produced a great performance in Croke Park. It killed me to see the boys in Croke Park and not be there. I’ve always wanted to play there so that was my motivation today and when you have Croke Park in your sights you don’t feel the tiredness.’

However, promotion was the main aim at the start of the year, and while outsiders may have scoffed at the idea, O’Connor insisted that within the Louth camp it was definitely a target.

‘We said at the start of the year that promotion was a target and the bookies probably didn’t agree, they made us favourites to go down, so it’s nice to prove everyone wrong. Promotion back-to-back and Division 2 status, it’s brilliant. After last week especially it was great to bounce back. It’s a fantastic feeling.’

O’Connor admitted that the Armagh performance hurt the players and that they were determined to take their second chance.

‘Thank God our performances at the start of the year gave us a second shot at it and it wasn’t do-or-die last week. A lot of us were disappointed that we let that opportunity slip and today was our last chance to keep it in our own hands. If we lost, you’re relying on Tipperary to beat Armagh and you don’t want that. We felt we were good enough to come down here [and win] and we knew from training that we had that performance in us. Maybe in hindsight we were a bit too lax coming into the Armagh game, but this week we talked about having a really good go at these boys.’

It didn’t go entirely to plan, however, as Louth struggled to find a rhythm in the first period, but O’Connor admitted that reaching half-time just two points in arrears was a bonus.

‘At half-time we were annoyed that our performance wasn’t good enough, but thank God we put it right in the second-half.

‘The penalty was a huge turn in events. But we realised that although the had a lot of chances they let them slip and we had to take advantage of that.

‘We could have been seven points down at half-time. They didn’t do anything fantastic to get through us, but it was slack by us we made a lot of silly choices going forward.

‘But some of the scores we got in the first-half showed that football is an easy game if you do things right and we were making it complicated, and in the second-half we put that right. We tightened up at midfield and at the back and stopped the runners coming through.’

But Louth needed to let Tipp know they were in a game and O’Connor felt that James Stewart did just that after the re-start.

‘I think his point at the start of the second-half was crucial. It was a goal chance and it was just the power and pace he came through at that we knew they were there for the taking. We needed the first score against Armagh last week and didn’t get it so it was a huge one today.

‘In the earlier matches I suppose people said we were playing the bottom-half teams, so it was great to show we could do it against the better teams and push on. Aaron Rogers has done serious work with us this year and I think we’re very fit and agile and flexible and it showed there when we pushed on in the last few minutes.’