Wexford will be difficult unless Wicklow play to their potential

WICKLOW manager Johnny Magee paid tribute to his players for coping with the conditions that befell Joule Park Aughrim on Sunday afternoon and for the manner with which they carved out the victory over the visiting London side.

The Garden County lads showed a real improvement in this their third league encounter and now go into the Wexford game in a far better frame of mind than recent weeks.

“I have to say, I played football for a long time but I don’t think I’ve ever things as bad as that. It was pretty bad and it gradually got worse and worse so hats off to the lads, they put in a big shift.

“It was very hard for them to read the passes because it could get caught in the wind and be knocked off course but we adjusted better to the conditions and to score 17 points on a day like that is a real positive from my point of view,” said Johnny Magee.

All discussions and debates on the game will have to point to the two sendings off as key factors in the end result but, to be fair, Wicklow led by 0-10 to 0-02 at the break and were no flattered by that scoreline so the Wicklow boss agreed that his side were already well in control before the sendings off.

“We were in control. They’re keeper pulled off an excellent save from Seanie as well. We had eight wides in the frist half and four into the keeper’s hands and our conversion rate was up. They kicked 2-16 against Carlow so we needed to apply our game. We didn’t do ourselves justice in the opening two games. And the lads were very determined to right that and that was reflected in the attitude from the lads and in their performances,” he said.

The former Dublin star said that the two earlier defeats were caused in part by rushing when in possession of the ball and he said the Wicklow footballers avoided doing that in Joule Park Aughrim on Sunday.

“We’ve got good footballlers and we need to get our scoring forwards on the ball more. The way the game is at the moment, like London had 13 or 14 players behind the ball at times and we were trying to find the space. We worked the ball well, we didn’t rush things.

“Rushing cost us the two games. We need to be a little bit more composed and it was good that we got a good spread of scores because if you have one person doing all the scores teams can target him,” he said.

Next up for Wicklow is the visit of the neighbours, Wexford. Seamus McEnaney’s men are flying and sitting pretty at the top of Division 4 but Magee feels that if his side find their stride and play to their potential then they have the ability to beat any team in the basement division.

“It’s going to be difficult, they’ve three from three but if you look at their performances, they only beat Waterford by two points.

“I’m confident that if we get ourselves right we can beat any team in this division. We need more consistency, we need more of what we got yesterday (Sunday).

“We need to keep improving on our performances,” he said.

With more bad weather forecast for the later part of the week, Johnny Magee is uncertain about the game going ahead in Aughrim but the Wicklow boss says that that’s not for him or his players to be concerned about, the main concern for them is Wexford and that’s what they’ll be concentrating on.