Our unforced errors were to blame
LAST week was very near to a royal flush for Sligo GAA. On Wednesday night our U21s had a great victory over Roscommon in the Connacht semi- final. Great credit has to go to Paul Taylor and John Mac junior. For me, Sligo were full value for their win and they now face All- Ireland favourites Galway on Saturday in the provincial final.
Then on Friday night we had a fundraiser in IT Sligo and our very own Kieran Quinn provided the entertainment, which was just sublime to say the least. Kieran, who won a Connacht championship with Sligo in 2007, provided us with tremendous entertainment and the show he put on was second to none. The evening was driven by Peter Greene, our county treasurer, John Clifford of Club Sligo, Eamonn McMunn our administrator and former Sligo manager Tommy Breheny. I know a lot of work went into this event and on behalf of all the players and management we would like to thank everyone involved in making this fundraiser a huge success.
On Saturday, our county minors had another fine win in the Connacht League over Leitrim. I’m sure David Cummins and co are happy with progress made so far. Speaking of David, I had a great debate with him on Friday night while at the concert in relation to football. If you’re wondering what the debate was about, let’s just say we all want what’s best for Sligo GAA and David now agrees that I was right!
Moving swiftly on to Sunday, our senior hurlers had a great win over Longford which sets them up nicely for the championship in the next few weeks. Declan Loughnane, Sligo’s player- manager, is doing tremendous work and I personally would love to see them go one step further this year in the Lory Meagher.
We, of course, then played Offaly after the hurlers. I suppose the problem going into this game after Saturday night’s results was that we had nothing tangible to play for in Division 3 whereas Offaly were still fighting for their lives and this was very evident as the game progressed. In saying that we certainly wanted to win the game and that was our plan.
As ever, people will want to know where it went wrong and the answer is fairly simple on this occasion. By half time, we have 14 unforced turnovers, which result in Offaly scoring 1- 5. So we go in three points down at the break. We regroup and make a few changes.
Offaly go four up midway through the second half but we bounce back and got it back to one with 15 minutes still to go. But we then bring the ball into a tackle from our kickout and Offaly punish us with a goal.
Four down again but our boys get it back down to two only to cough up another easy turnover which results in Offaly kicking the last two scores.
We know as a group that we need to be more clinical in our passing because it let us down on Sunday. On the plus side we only missed one free and that’s a big improvement from our last two games. It’s funny, we have won two games and drawn one this year. With the games we lost if we scored half our frees against Antrim and Longford we would have picked up full points at our ease.
On Sunday it wasn’t the frees that cost us though. This time but it was down to us giving the ball away cheaply, without any undue pressure being placed on us – these are why we call them unforced turnovers.
Just as with the free- taking, we will work on this going forward and try and put things right against Louth, who are currently top of the division after a great win against Tipp, next Sunday.
Believe me when I say this though, these boys are not far off...