‘Wee need to take a hard look at ourselves’
COLIN Kelly insists Louth GAA will have to take a ‘long, hard look at itself’ after suffering yet another Leinster Championship defeat to neighbours Meath on Sunday.
The Royals dumped the Reds into the Qualifiers for the second year running, extending their unbeaten provincial record over their old rivals to 32 years.
Kelly offered no excuses for the 11-point defeat afterwards and took his share of the blame for abandoning the ‘sweeper’ system that has served his team so well over the past two seasons.
‘We were comprehensively beaten by a better team - look at the score count 27 to 12. Unfortunately there’s a gulf between the two sides and we can’t deny that fact. Yeah, we put ourselves in a decent enough position, but every time we scored they came back and scored very easily.
‘We went man-for-man because we felt the sweeper system wasn’t working and they had just too much for us. Then the damage was done and to drop someone in probably wouldn’t have been worth it. Overall it’s very, very disappointing.
‘That’s twice we’ve come up here in similar fashion and twice we didn’t deliver. I’ll be heavily critical of myself, it was me who changed the system. It didn’t work.
‘Would we have been better coming up here and dropping everyone behind the ball? I don’t know. We felt we had to change it from what we have done in the last few games. We played a challenge against Westmeath with the sweeper system and couldn’t stop the runners coming at us.
‘Today we said we’d try something different and pushed up and went for it. We felt there were goals in us if we pushed up high enough, but unfortunately we just didn’t play well, whether that’s down to Meath or down to us.’
Asked if he could take any positives form the defeat, Kelly continued: ‘It’s not really the time to look for positives. I can stand here and give you the party policy line, but we weren’t good enough on the day. We knew how big of a task it was.
‘You’re talking about a team that went very close to promotion to Division 1. They’ve been playing at a level we want to get to for the last few years. Their support is second to none, they’ve a good management team and their backroom set-up is incredible.
‘We’ll sit down together during the week, but at this moment in time, if you’ve never been a beaten Leinster Championship dressing room, it’s not about looking for positives.
‘There’s only so many times you can come here and say ‘maybe next year’. Sometimes you have to question yourself. I certainly have to question myself as a manager and the players need to take a long hard look at themselves and ask ourselves why does this happen. Maybe we need to ask ourselves are we good enough?’
That said, Louth have 13 days to recalibrate for the All-Ireland Qualifiers, and while he conceded it will be a tough task, Kelly insisted his players will rise to the challenge.
‘First of all we need to re-group. It’s not an easy place to be. Tough dressing room, tough on everyone. We’ll pick ourselves up and give it a shot, they always do.
‘Two or three days we’ll get back at it. It won’t be easy, but there’s a lot of friendships built up and we’ll do it. We can call each other out when we need to and we need to take a long hard look at ourselves now. Today wasn’t good enough - that’s where it’s at.
‘We’ve a great bunch of players with a great skillset, but there are hard questions that need to be answered. Maybe now is not the time but for now we’ll re-group and make a plan and give it a lash over the next couple of weeks.’