*Paul Madden flanked by Brendy Rouine and Dermot Coughlan. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill.
EFFORTS to make Cusack Park a fortress for Clare’s footballers under Paul Madden became undone with a five point loss to Westmeath in a performance riddled with ‘poor decision making and poor turnovers’.
Successive defeats in Division 3 of the Allianz National Football League has piled the pressure on Clare’s footballers who still have a chance of securing promotion but now have to focus on avoiding relegation to the bottom tier as they sit with zero points from two outings.
Trailing by nine points at the beginning of the second half, Clare managed to reduce the deficit to two points with fifty two minutes played only to concede 1-3 without reply before falling to a five point loss for the second weekend running. “Any day you lose is frustrating but particularly to lose a game at home is very frustrating,” surmised Madden following the game.
Turnovers soft ones from Clare gifted Westmeath too many scores, he felt. “Overall we were poor, we didn’t play anything like we can, mainly a lot of the issue came from our decision making and poor turnovers, in the modern game as I’ve highlighted as recently as last week, if you turn over the ball you are in big trouble and that is what happened for the majority of their scores, particularly in the first half”.
Mistakes were compounded for Clare through their inability to respond to them, the Ennis man stated. “We were really up for the game, we trained well all week, I thought the focus was good and we started ok for the first ten or twelve minutes against a little breeze but we did quite well but when we started to make mistakes it sucked the life out of us almost, lads got frustrated and disappointed, our energy levels dropped when we made mistakes as opposed to responding to the mistakes”.
Ronan Wallace’s goal in additional time of the first half, the last score before the break “was a killer,” he lamented. “We were five points down and we deserved to be based on the turnovers, the goal put it to eight but in the modern game an eight point gap isn’t a huge amount, we were five up last weekend at half time and lost by five, a ten point swing is common enough in this new game, we conceded the first score of the half and went nine down but we got back to two points and then we did a few stupid things with the ball, we had the ball and were winning possession around the middle.
“We did very well on their kickouts again today, we were over sixty percent on their kickouts for the game which is really good but we carried ball into contact and didn’t have enough support runners off the shoulder to help lads and got tackled by their men. There is a lot to look at but at the end of the day, I’m the manager and I’m responsible for the results, I said to the players they have to keep their heads up and if there is any flak I’ll take it”.
Round one saw Clare unlucky to lose to Down but there was no complaints with the outcome on Sunday where their performance was a level below what they displayed in Newry. “It is more disappointing in the context we were playing at home, we knew before we played Down that this was going to be a massive game and we wanted to make this a fortress so in that context but again we lost by five so it is frustrating”.
Hindering Clare from building a home fortress was the lack of support for what was Madden’s first home league fixture as manager. Cusack Park had an attendance of just 1,389 for the fixture. “We can’t control the crowd but the crowd that were here we have to give them something to cheer for and at the end of the day in patches we did and they got behind us but we seem to concede a score very easily after getting a score which is frustrating”.
Injury ruled wing back Fionn Kelleher out of the fixture, the Doora/Barefield defender is understood to have sustained the knock in training and the subsequent decision to deploy Dermot Coughlan from attack to defence greatly upset Clare’s structure but Madden disagreed. “Obviously we’d like to have everyone but that is the nature of the game, we have to rejig, I wouldn’t say it upset things, he did very well and he wasn’t able to play this week, that is just the nature of it and we had enough guys on the pitch and the bench to come on and win that game but we didn’t perform at the level we wanted to”.
