*Jamie Malone is tackled by Ben McCormack. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill
BEN MCCORMACK’s sending off in Sunday’s Allianz NFL tie disrupted Clare’s footballers.
Kildare manager Glenn Ryan was relieved following the final whistle on Sunday as his charges picked up their first points of the campaign having lost out to Dublin and Cork in the previous rounds.
For the opening forty minutes of the tie it looked as if Kildare would fall to a third successive defeat but the Lilywhites kicked eight of the last nine scores to claw their way back from trailing by six points and somehow emerged victorious in Ennis.
A two-time All Star, Ryan reflected, “Whether it was drifting away from us or not I’m not sure, maybe Clare were playing the better football than us, sometimes sendings off can disrupt the flow of a game, I think it did from a Clare perspective. We were finding it hard to deal with their running game in the first half and the second half, maybe with the extra man their priority wasn’t going forward but we had enough to worry about without worrying about Clare.
“Our lads started playing more direct but showed the greater hunger around the middle of the field for the scraps on the ground, we managed in comparison to the first half a lot more turnovers in the tackle which gave us a platform going forward”.
Unlike his Clare counterpart Colm Collins, Glenn felt there was similarities between this tie and the Banner’s opening round win over Louth. “Clare did something very similar to Louth here in their first game, you’re always very conscious of that, there’s always the opportunities there. It was a stiff breeze, it allowed us to push up with the Clare goalkeeper kicking against that significant wind, it created opportunities from us to kick from further out, it was great to get the two points in the end”.
Trailing by four points at half time with the slight wind to come on the restart, his message to the Kildare players at the break was to focus more on their football. “The most important thing is to try play better football than we were, there was a significant breeze but I don’t think it was through a lack of effort but maybe we were channelling that effort in the wrong direction and not channelling it in the manners that we are good at which showed at the end, we have fellas capable of getting scores if the ball is kicked into them, we got it to our better shooters in the second half”.
He continued, “There’s no doubt if we lost that game obviously things would be a lot more difficult, we still have a lot more work to get done, we have a huge game against Derry next weekend, we’ll pack this away and get ready for next week, it will be as much pressure on that game and as much intensity, ferocity and hunger as there was today. At the very start of the year we’ve been trying to take it game by game, it’s certainly important after the first two games that we didn’t look beyond down the line and just keep our focus on what is ahead of us and what we can immediately affect”.
