Ladies in Connacht final
For most ladies’ football teams, a significant amount of player turnover is a fact of life. An intercounty LGFA star will always find it that much tougher to get an employer to help her out with a job close to home than her male counterpart, family reasons can be so much more restrictive, and support structures aren’t nearly as robust, to help out those players who are working a long way from their home club and county.
However even by normal standards, this Sunday’s TG4 Connacht Intermediate championship final is likely to be heavily influenced by which team has found their rhythm best after sustaining a huge number of losses over the winter.
Sligo manager Paddy Henry did like every self-respecting GAA manager and declared his team the underdogs for the game recently, but it was hard to argue with his reasoning.
“It was just a bad year, a lot of the girls retired, there were a lot of injuries and we lost about 13 or 14 of last year’s team,” conceded the Tourlestrane man. “We are where we are and that’s it. Taking it all in we just had to sit down and rebuild the whole lot”.
“We have a Connacht final now and we will have to see how it goes. We are complete underdogs because Roscommon are well-established, but that said, we are not going up there to see it, we are going up there to win, we’re definitely not going up there to make up the numbers”.
While it will be Henry’s fourth year in charge of the side, he accepts that they’ll travel to Castlebar with effectively a new team, and one that has endured a difficult season so far.
“We didn’t expect to lose so many players, effectively we had to go around and start picking up a new team” he said.
“We didn’t get that much time in Division Two, though we wanted to stay there but it didn’t work out for us. Now we are going to be in Division Three, instead of going higher you are gone back down again. But every team loses girls at the end of the year, though coming from smaller counties doesn’t help”.
Roscommon manager Michael Finneran has also lost a number of key players, and he was hugely disappointed to miss out on a place in the knockout stages of Division Three, but he seemed positive about how his side has prepared for this final since finishing up at the end of March.
“We probably carry a tight enough panel and we had a few injuries coming towards the end of the league and it really told, we struggled in the last couple of games” said the former Roscommon midfielder.
“It is a good while since the last round of the league against Kildare, it’s been a big break, so we definitely feel like we put that behind us. We’re in a completely different position than we were coming back about eight weeks ago.
“Saying that it’s very hard to know exactly where we are until you get back out on the pitch.
“Until you are playing competitive games you don’t know exactly where you are, but we feel good, and from the challenge games we seem to be going well,” he remarked.
Throw-in for Sligo v Roscommon on Sunday is 2pm in MacHale Park with Mayo and Galway in the Senior final at 4pm.