McEntee glad to put league campaign behind him
THE league campaign wasn’t supposed to end like this for Meath!
However the GAA fixture fixers overlooked Mother Nature and they hadn’t much concern for players either when it came to scheduling matches.
Cavan, Tipperary and Cork also played their part in ensuring that the Royals would be fighting to stay in division 2 instead of fighting to get out of it by the time it came to take on their neighbours.
Following three successive defeats Meath had dug themselves a hole but they just managed to scrape out of it even if it wasn’t a vintage display against their neighbours at the Gaelic Grounds.
‘If anybody thought we were going to come here and it was going to be champagne stuff on a pitch as heavy as that, is being naive,’ manager Andy McEntee said after his side secured their Division 2 status for another year.
‘We weren’t great in the firsthalf, but we stayed patient. We kept believing in what we were trying to do and ultimately it came good. Patience was key because it would have been very easy to get frustrated out there today.
‘Admittedly we lacked a bit of pace coming out of defence in the first-half and that gave Louth an extra opportunity to get set-up like they did and we struggled to break them down.
‘There was a bit of an awkward wind as well, but our shot selection wasn’t good in the first-half, we had 10 shots from play while they had two, yet they went in a point up at the break. I think in the second-half we probably changed that a little bit. We went at them with a little bit more pace and our shot selection was better.’
Overall though Meath’s campaign proved a major disappointment following a prom-
ising start and McEntee didn’t try to hide his frustrations.
‘If you want to be really brutal. We are in the same position this year that we were this time last year, still in Division 2,’ he continued. ‘We finished by winning two games that we really had to win, so that is a positive by itself.
‘We had three points out of four from the first two games and then four points from four from the last two games, but we had a very disappointing bit in between.
‘Maybe some of the things we tried to do in those games against Cavan, Tipperary and Cork just didn’t work out. I’d like to think in the last couple of games we looked a bit more solid defensively.
‘You have to look at the situation we found ourselves in. We found ourselves having to win our last two games to stay in the division. Anybody who is involved in sport knows that momentum is a very hard thing to stop, whether that is good momentum or bad momentum.
‘The lads dug in when they really had to, and when their backs were against the wall they responded, so I’m going to give them a lot of credit for that.’