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 Irish examiner 20th February 2004 | |||
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By Diarmuid O'Flynn
They have examined the entrails, analysed every aspect of play, both their own and that of the opposition. Their opinions make for interesting reading. “We were good, we were bad, then we were good again. Newtown were the opposite, bad, then a long very good spell, then towards the end they went down again, it was our period of dominance. We’ll be looking at that, trying to play the game we started off with, the game that got us back into it. We aim to keep the pressure on and not give them any space,” O’Loughlin’s selector Aidan Fogarty admits.
During Newtown’s purple period in the latter 20 minutes of the first half, their midfield pairing of Jerry O’Connor and Alan T O’Brien dominated the. The second half saw a more crowded midfield area however, which slowed the Newtown attack. This was partly due to the Gaels ploy of bringing one of their inside forwards to midfield, but, according to Fogarty, Newtown didn’t help their own cause. “They seemed to crowd it themselves as well,” he reckoned, “their half-back line and half-forward line were out the field a bit, crowded out that area.”
It was always expected that this game would be a good one, two very good teams; what hadn’t been anticipated was that one side would so dominate the other for long periods, as happened, with one period of dominance serving to cancel out the other. Could be that we’ll see a more even, tit-for-tat game tomorrow now that O’Loughlin’s and Newtown have direct experience of each other’s styles.
“Yeah, both teams will look at their performances, try and isolate what went wrong, go through the fifteen. The fellas who played well last weekend won’t necessarily be able to repeat that performance, but against that, we know some fellas can play a lot better. That’s always the way with replays anyway, lads that didn’t play well one day will be doubly keen to make up for it the next day.” Like team leader and former Kilkenny All-Ireland-winning captain Andy Comerford?
“Every player can have an off-day, and the ball just didn’t seem to fall for Andy. Ben O’Connor did play well, but any ball Andy went for seemed to fall away from him that’s the nature of the game. Newtown probably went out to that game thinking that if certain fellas did certain things they’d have a great chance; maybe some of them did, others didn’t come up to expectations. Like them, we have lads determined to play better this time.”
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