Mulroy feels Reds are in a be tter place
PETE McGrath often lamented the absence of Sam Mulroy during his ill-fated one-year stint over Louth and the Naomh Mairtin man is beginning to show people just what the Down legend was missing last season.
The full forward has been a pivotal figure in each of Louth’s backto-back league wins, delivering a man-of-the-match performance on Sunday and providing his third goal assist in two games.
Mulroy had to watch much of last season’s misery from the stands, so he’s particularly pleased to play a hand in Louth’s revival this term.
‘A lot of people were negative from last year and it’s hard to block that out. We get a lot of bad press and everyone was negative outside the group. This year we came back under Wayne and had a lot of positive thoughts in-house.
‘The Longford game, we probably should have won at home, but it’s been nice to come back with two wins, and having the fans on the pitch at the end, it’s brilliant to have them supporting us, and seeing the Geraldines kids down today was great to.
‘It’s been a massive mentality switch for us after the Longford game.’
The manner of the comeback made the post-match celebrations totally understandable and Mulroy admitted winning in such dramatic circumstances made it all the sweeter.
‘It’s unreal. There are a lot of lads excited and a lot of lads in shock. I think we were five down at half-time, but just kept tipping away. To sneak it like that is unreal.
‘There was a very strong wind and kicking against it in the first half, I thought we did alright. Playing with it wasn’t easy either, conditions were bad but we’ve got the result.’
Staying in touch in the first period proved just as important as the late comeback, but Mulroy insisted Louth were disappointed with the goals they conceded.
‘We shouldn’t have conceded the goals. We wanted to ‘shut up shop’ in the first half, see the game out until half-time and play with the breeze after that.
‘But these things happen and we had to be resilient and have the mental strength to come back.’
Mulroy got as good a view as anyone of the Declan Hogan’s dramatic late own goal
‘We were all running after it, Ross had it at the start. It’s unfortunate for ‘your man’, it’s a sickener, but we don’t get them too often, we’ll take it!’
Louth are now looking up as opposed to over their shoulder and Mulroy feels they could even be in a better position.
‘Four points from six, we should be six out of six. We haven’t really spoken about going up, the goal is just to perform in every game. It’s nice that we’re not looking down the table, sitting on four points, it takes the pressure off.’