Return to Louth set-up was a challenging time for Conor

AFTER an 18-month adventure in New Zealand that ruled him out of the 2017 campaign entirely, Conor Grimes was thrown head-first back into the deep end this season.

An avid surfer, the Glen Emmets man knew it was a simple case of sink or swim, but with Louth struggling to make any headway in Division 2, he admits it was a challenging time.

‘It was difficult coming back in after being away for a year, but then the league going the way it did wouldn’t have been how we’d planned it.

‘It took me a few months to get back up to the pace.

There was such a turnover of players in one year, so it was maybe inevitable that we ended up where we are.

We were outclassed in Division

2, so the position we’re in is fair.’

The big full forward isn’t afraid to tell it straight and he feels the

Reds just haven’t been good enough going forward.

‘Our attacking play wasn’t good enough, teams were able to hold us off. Defensively we were set up well but when we got into the final third it wasn’t good enough and it’s difficult to look at the scoreboard and see it so low during games.

‘But we’re not dwelling on it. We’re looking forward to the championship now and we feel the young players are stepping up to the plate. ‘We’ve done well in leagues in previous years and not so well in the Championship, so we’re hoping we can turn it around this year. ‘We’ve put the league behind us and we’re full of confidence and we feel like we’re going in the right direction.’

Despite the obvious gap between Division 2 and 4, Conor points out that Louth and Carlow will be battling it out in the third tier next spring, so he believes there’ll be nothing between the sides on Sunday. ‘We’re both in Division 3 next year, so it’s a level playing field. Carlow are flying and their confidence is going to be high, so it will be no easy task. But we’re going to Portlaoise to win the game. Carlow will be strong, they’ll be gunning for us, but we think we have what it takes to get over the line.

‘We’ve had a lot to work on over the last few months, correcting the mistakes we were making and we did a lot of hard work to try and rectify them, so that might be a good thing. ‘We know we have what it takes, we just haven’t been able to produce it on the day, so it’s been a frustrating campaign. When we look around the dressing-room we feel like we have the quality and we have the work done, but we haven’t produced it, so we’ll be hoping we can do that against Carlow.’