Wee need to improve for Meath
LOUTH captain Padraig Rath insisted that Louth expected a real stiff test from Wicklow on Sunday - but he still felt the Reds make life hard on themselves in a stop-start display.
‘We expected it to be tough, but I think we made hard work of it,’ conceded the Dreadnots’ man. ‘[It was] through our own mistakes more than anything. The first half we gave them a goal and four points simply from turnovers.
‘We had a short kick out punished by a goal, and a couple of balls given away in the middle of the field allowed them to hit us on the break.
‘We made silly errors, hand passing errors, kick passing errors, things that we shouldn’t be doing if we’re engaged and I think we were a little bit sluggish in the first half especially. It took us too long to get that right.’
Rath was inclined to agree that Louth’s bright opening against the breeze may have contributed to some degree of complacency.
‘Yeah maybe we got the good start into the wind and lads just sort of took their eye off the ball for a couple of minutes.
‘The mistakes seemed to happen in a short period of time andit took us a few minutes then to settle again. They got ahead of us after a couple of minutes but if had we seen ourselves through that dodgy period a little bit better maybe we wouldn’t have been in the sticky situation.
‘We allowed them to come at us and we didn’t show enough composure to get ourselves through that bad period. Obviously you are not going to dominate for 70 minutes but you have to be able to settle down when they get on top and it wasn’t good enough on our behalf.
‘It could have the good start, I don’t know, but we’ll just have to put that right next time.’
But all that said Louth now have a Championship contest under their belt, which will be an advantage over Meath on Sunday week.
‘The 70 minutes is a bonus and it was a great test. I suppose this time last year we played Carlow and probably thought we were doing well, flying on the crest of a wave and then we came down here and Meath beat us by four points in the end.
‘We just didn’t perform that day so maybe this will be a wake up call for us and maybe it happened at the right time. Yyou wouldn’t want to be performing like that against Meath.
‘I think today we were lucky enough to get ourselves over the line and maybe Wicklow just didn’t have the game on the day to beat us.
‘But another team would have and we could easily be walking out of here beate.
‘So it is good to have the 70 minutes at championship intensity and it should stand us in good stead next time out.’
Another plus from Sunday’s performance was the impact from the bench with Jim McEneaney, Declan Byrne and Ger McSorley kicking five of the last six points between them. He doesn’t envy Colin Kelly the task of picking a starting XV one bit.
‘You could see the lads are flying in training and it is hard for the management to leave certain boys out. But it is great to have that impact. You look at Decky coming on and kicking two points, Sam played his part and Jim as well. It was good to get the quality of them boys coming on to give us a little extra impetus.
‘It wasn’t like they were coming on and keeping it at the same level, there was an increase in intensity.’
That workload hike was something every player had to work in the second period, with Rath pointing out that the half-time GPS results were revealing.
‘Our first-half stats were very low, probably the lowest they were all season, and the boys that came in knew that.
‘So they knew that if they wanted to be putting themselves in the shop window for next week that they have to perform.
‘Colin, Colm and Aaron always preach that you are not going to win with your starting fifteen, there is two teams, there’s your starting team and then your finishing team.
‘The boys who are coming off the bench are going to have just as much, if not a greater impact than the lads who start. That’s why we don’t try and last the 70 minutes, you empty out. I think in the first half none of us did that, none of us emptied out.
In the second half I suppose we did up it a little bit. They got a purple patch at the start of the second half and it did look dodgy but then the boys came in, Decky and Jim especially and they just gave us an extra level.
‘That’s great to see and there are other lads like Ronan Holcroft, Derek Crilly and James Califf who know that they’ll have to push and perform for the next two weeks and if they get the chance they’ll have to take it.’
If the Reds were a little lacklustre on Sunday, Rath insists there’s no greater motivation to put things right than a date with Meath, but he’s not too worried about what the bookies think.
‘I suppose today everyone would have said we were overwhelming favourites or whatever and next week it will be Meath, but it doesn’t really matter. We are going to give it all we have and there is a semi final up for grabs for the winners so underdogs or not, we are going to be going gung-ho.
‘But I think the favourites tag didn’t sit too well with us today and maybe we believed the hype. But the next day we know that the only pressure on us to perform will be from ourselves.
‘We’ve standards that we want to set and we have targets that we want to hit this year. We didn’t do it today but we got the end goal, we got the win but if we want to achieve what we’ve set out to achieve then we’re going to have to up our game twofold.
‘Meath is going to be a completely different game. You are going to have a bigger crowd and there’ll be a bit of bite to it.’