‘We had a good first half but didn’t kick a ball for 15 minutes’

JOHN McPartland says he is happy to still be running in the race for this year’s Sligo senior football championship.

An impressive first half saw his Coolera/Strandhill lead by three at the break, only for a resurgent Tourlestrane to dominate the opening half of the second period.

Coolera never let their opponents out of their sight however and came back to lead the tie and indeed could have won it late on.

Still in the hunt for their first senior decider since 2011, McPartland reckons his side still have plenty to improve on if they are to upset the form book and beat Tourlestrane in the replay.

“We know what way Tourlestrane wanted to play and we worked on our plan for two or three weeks”, he told the Sligo Champion.

“But we’re still in the champi- onship and that’s the main thing.”

“We wanted to keep the ball first and then see what happened. We did some good things with the ball but at times we were careless, taking the ball into tackles and not taking the right option.

“We had a good first half but we didn’t really kick a ball for fifteen minutes but I guess that shows how good Tourlestrane are. They’re going for three in a row!

“I actually thought Tourlestrane had it towards the end but we did enough to intercept it. Maybe we were lucky but we’re happy enough with what we’ve done.”

McPartland said Brian Kennedy’s red card mid-way through the first half didn’t mean too much to him in terms of his approach.

“I think 14 men suited them because they put everyone behind the ball anyway.

“Even a man up, we gave away the ball too often, made too many mistakes and didn’t come out with the ball in the tackle enough.”