‘We came here to win so it hurts’ - Conor Daly

By Kevin Egan

After a year of taking credit for the quality of their football, their resolve in a hard battle and their incredible in-game control, the players and management of Pádraig Pearses readily accepted the responsibility for failing to deliver to anything like the same extend in Markievicz Park on Sunday afternoon.

“Fair dues to Coolera-Strandhill, they came with a plan, they were the better team on the day and our skill execution was down time and time again,” was how Conor Daly summarised his team’s performance in their 1-15 to 1-14 extra-time defeat.

“For whatever reason, we were caught in a bit of a funk and couldn't get out of it. We didn't lie down and die, we stayed going and came back from being four down in extra-time to give ourselves a chance to sneak penos, but we probably didn't deserve it,” he acknowledged, speaking while the Sligo champions celebrated a first Connacht senior club title for the Yeats County since 1983.

Manager Frank Canning and defender Niall Carty also spoke after the game, with the two men honing in on different aspects of the performance as prime reasons for their failure to win a second provincial title in four seasons.

“14 wides, to four for them, tells the story that we were well in the game but everything they seemed to touch turned to gold” said Canning. “Five out of five (for Coolera-Strandhill) in the first half, seven out of 14 for us so we just didn’t close it out,” he said.

Even so, once Declan Kenny’s penalty hit the net as the game approached the 40 minute mark, Pearses were four points up – five, once Eoin Colleran made it 1-8 to 0-6 with a free immediately afterwards. It was the team’s failure to build on that platform that really frustrated Carty.

“We created a lot of chances in the first half, we played some good football and went in two points ahead and you would have thought it would be a good position. But we didn’t come out in the second half,” said the Athlone Community College teacher.

“We should have been able to see it through from there, but it’s been a problem over the years where we’ve let teams back into it a little bit, taking our foot off the gas and losing control a little bit. And that definitely happened out there. “They put serious pressure on us and kicked some great scores, we weren’t getting much time on the ball and we just never got hold of the game in the last 15 minutes. We never got the platform to kick on and get that extra point, to make them have to work a bit harder to get back at us,” he continued.

Carty was one of the ten players that crowded the penalty area when Ross Doherty punched in the goal that ultimately made the crucial difference, but even though it was a hammer blow, he maintained that Pearses still had the time to try and undo the damage.

“It is hard to claw it back when you’ve only ten minutes to work with, but we had the chances. We just didn’t execute again. There were loads of mistakes out there all over the field, and fair play to Coolera-Strandhill. They came back at us, they showed serious resolve”.

2024 will still be the year that Pearses won just their third ever senior football championship in Roscommon, but there’s no doubt that it might take this week and longer for the Woodmount men to be able to see things that way.

“The reality is it hurts” Daly admitted. “There is no point saying otherwise or brushing over it. We came here today to win so it hurts.”

*See this week's paper for match report and more photos.