It’s ‘derby day’ in Cusack Park next Sunday as defending Westmeath senior football champions, St Loman’s take on neighbours, Mullingar Shamrocks in round three of the Senior Football Championship (7.30pm).
Neither side were convincing last weekend: St Loman’s proved too strong for a spirited Castledaly, while Mullingar Shamrocks had four points to spare (1-11 to 0-10) over a Maryland team minus the influence of star forward, Callum McCormack, who’s in America for the summer. Former Mullingar Shamrocks star, Bernard Flynn had a stark warning for his charges afterwards.
“It’s St Loman’s next and if we perform like that, we won’t keep it kicked out to them,” was the manager’s assertion. He was certainly in no mood to offer excuses about his side’s insipid display.
“We won, but it was a poor performance. It’s definitely not good enough; we’re missing a number of players, but I’d have to say we’d be disappointed with the performance,” he said.
“Maryland deserve full credit; they never gave up and they’re a good, solid country community and football means everything to them. They kept going and they showed great heart.
“But we’d be very disappointed as a management team; we’ve an awful lot to work on. On that performance we’d win absolutely no championship whatsoever,” he added.
VERY POOR
The Meath great was in no mood to offer any excuses and insisted his players will have to up the ante ahead of next weekend’s Mullingar showdown.
“I’m fully aware of the challenge that lies ahead; I’m a realist, there’s no ‘bullology’, we say it as we see it. We were decent enough against The Downs; we’d been coming fairly good in the last few league matches and challenge games, but this was a very poor perform- ance,” he remarked.
Flynn didn’t share the view that his players simply ‘sat back’ after an early John Ganly goal and were always in control of things.
“I wouldn’t agree. You’ve got to play with intensity (look at Meath today when they weren’t right for it). Okay we won, we were never in danger of losing the game. Maybe we sat back on our laurels a little bit, but that’s a dangerous thing to do. You shouldn’t be doing that. There’s a lot more left in those guys; their intensity levels, aggression, etc, should be much higher,” he opined.
