‘Focus and goal to win first game’
WHILE Paul Taylor was understandably pleased to have his first win as Sligo manager, soon after the final whistle had blown at McGovern Park in Ruislip it was clear his attention had already switched to an important showdown with Antrim next Sunday at Markievicz Park.
The Yeats County never looked in danger of losing this fixture, with five goals helping them to a comfortable win.
“It’s great to get the first win,” Taylor admitted. “But the most important thing was it was the first game in the league and the focus and goal was to win the first game. We’ve come over here and won it and we’ve got the two points and I think every team in the country wanted to win their first game this weekend and we’ve done that and we’re happy with that so we’ll focus on the next game now.”
Taylor was particularly pleased with his side’s application in the first half, when Sligo laid the foundations for the win playing into the elements.
“I thought we started the game very well against a good breeze, I thought we played very well. Yes we got a bit of luck, there’s no point in saying we didn’t but we’ll take any bit of luck we can, we didn’t get an awful lot in the past but it’s pleasing to score the goals, absolutely but there was an awful lot of positives in that performance and we always look at the positive.
“But I think the second half of the game was frustrating from the point of view we made a lot of mistakes, we had a lot of ball and we turned over a lot of ball as well, but we’ll work on those things. This is only our first game, this is the game we prepared for so we’ll take the positives out of it, we’ll look at some of the things that went wrong and we’ll try to correct them for Sunday because we’ve a big game at home in Markievicz Park.” Next Sunday’s clash with Antrim – who overcame Paul Galvin’s Wexford on the opening weekend – will take on an added significance given that both sides have one eye on earning promotion. “We have been preparing well and our preparation was going well, we were hopeful coming here that we would win the first game, it’s not very easy because you don’t get to know an awful lot about London. I believe Antrim had a good win today; Antrim are probably the favourites to win
Division Four at the moment and we’re under no illusions about the task that’s in front of us next week, but we won the game today. That has to be a boost to our confidence as well, we’ll take the positives out of it and look forward to the challenge [of Antrim]”.
Taylor continued: “Promotion is the aim of every team in Division Four and I’d be telling lies if I said it wasn’t our aim as well but at the same time you can only achieve that by taking every game as it comes.
“So, we focused on today’s game, didn’t look any further than that, now we focus on Antrim and hope we can get a win there, a home win there and we look forward, we focus on our preparation, focus on the positives from today, try to correct some of the negatives and we focus on Antrim.”
INSET: Paul Taylor.