*Dermot Coughlan. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill
UNFORCED ERRORS influenced the Banner to their exit out of the All-Ireland minor football tier 2 championship with Sligo winning by six points in Cusack Park last Saturday.
That’s according to team manager Dermot Coughlan who felt his charges “conceded a few soft scores. Inclement weather conditions did play a part but we were sloppy early on. They punished us for it, once more we gave ourselves a mountain to climb and once more, we came back into it well, but it was too little too late”.
“It’s hard to come back from early goals, particularly so at underage level and hard given the conditions that were there, three points is big score”.
“We said at half time we can play an awful lot better. We were going to create goal chances but we didn’t take them. We created three today and got one”, the Kilmurry Ibrickane clubman added.
That said Dermot stressed “this is about the development of the players, they have had six games and I am delighted for them, it’s been a tremendous year for us. We played top class oppositions; we did well against Cork for 45 minutes, and today for 30 to 35 minutes, “I am very proud of the lads”.
The Clare boss was impressed with the standard of points kicked by Sligo. “Our press was good enough, but they were able to kick from distance and for under 17’s some of the scores today were from 30 to 35 metres and were very good and you have got to hand it to them”.
Concluding the manager stated his “team has never thrown in the towel. The team has fought hard all year and probably won the second half in all games. Today we said at half time that they needed to bring the fight to the table and we think they did but we needed those goal chances to go in. There is great talent in this group and a lot of those players will go to play at under 20 and hopefully a fair share will go to senior”.
