Footballers “can’t afford another slip” as they look to bounce back in Down

Down v Cork

Sunday, February 4

Pairc Esler, Newry Throw-in at 1.30 Referee: Fergal Kelly (Longford) IN and of itself, Saturday’s defeat for Cork against Tipperary was a disappointing one, especially in the manner than a three-point lead early in the second half was turned into a six-point defeat by the end of the game.

In the bigger picture, the loss means that Cork’s margin for error across the next six league games is severely reduced if Ronan McCarthy’s side are to properly challenge for promotion to Division 1 of the Allianz FL.

Last year, Cork began with a draw away to Galway which really should have been a win and then lost heavily away to Kildare in their second game. It meant Peadar Healy’s side were always playing catch-up and ultimately found the gap to the leaders to be too large to bridge.

McCarthy admitted that the Tipp result leaves Cork not far off a must-win situation ahead of this weekend’s trip to Páirc Esler to take on Down, who enjoyed an opening weekend 1-14 to 0-11 win over Louth in Drogheda.

“It puts an added pressure on the game next weekend,” he said. “You are away from home and so on. I remember Conor Counihan’s last year, we lost our first two league games and we won away in the third one. The fact that it is the top two who get promoted, you can’t really slip up again. That is the real problem.

“We can’t afford another slip. If you do, to win five games in a row to get 10 points to qualify is a difficult task. It adds pressure to the game next and we have to deal with that.”

Cork did start last week’s game with six players making their full league debuts whereas Tipperary, even without injured pair Paddy Codd and Philip Austin, had a team without any debutants. A factor in the result, perhaps? “Maybe,” McCarthy said, “but we wouldn’t have felt that was an issue for us in advance of the game so we are not going to throw it out now.

“If anything, a lot of our newer players did extremely well and stood up. It is difficult in that it was the opening league game, there is the whole thing with Páirc and everything else, maybe they were more experienced than us, but we felt we had a good enough team coming into and a good enough squad to go and win the game, and we hadn’t.”

One bad result isn’t cause to rip everything up, however. In that regard, it’s perhaps a blessing in disguise that Cork have lost players to retirement over the winter as McCarthy and his management have to keep faith with the newer guard.

He remains optimistic that the two aims of achieving promotion and building a new team can be combined successfully.

“It is both,” he said. “We are trying to develop a team and panel. We also wanted to win the game tonight and we picked a team which we thought was good enough to win it. That hasn’t happened. That’s it. We’ll go back to work next week and we’ll go at it again.

“We’re happy with the way things are going. We’ll steer a steady course, keep going the way we planned to go. We are confident that result will come eventually. There were elements of the performance which were positive tonight.”

In terms of team news, the Nemo Rangers contingent of Paul Kerrigan, Luke Connolly, Barry O’Driscoll and Stephen Cronin remain unavailable ahead of their All-Ireland club SFC semi-final, while Kanturk’s intermediate hurling final rules out Aidan Walsh.

On top of that, Seán Powter is out injured after he had to depart Saturday’s game.

“That was a hamstring pull and a serious one, I’d say,” McCarthy said. “You are trying to manage guys. We’ll just have to see how guys come through the Sigerson and see what we have when we sit down on Thursday to pick the team.”

In the absence of Kerrigan, midfielder Ian Maguire is the captain for the league. He is keen to put the lessons of the Tipp game into practice this week.

“It has happened over the last couple of years and it is frustrating,” he said. “I thought we showed good fight again. It is just trying to break that momentum. A big thing is holding onto the ball. We gave it away cheaply and Tipperary put us to the sword.

“If we could just do a better job of controlling break and controlling possession, that is how you break it. These are the lessons. Ultimately, it is about promotion. You take lessons with every game we learned a harsh one there.”