LADIES SFC
Ladies slip out of SFC All-Ireland
Daire Walsh
IN the wake of their 3-10 to 0-10 reversal against Laois in the TG4 Ladies Senior Football Championship Second Round, Cavan joint-manager Finian Farrell was full of praise for the effort produced by his squad throughout the year.
While the absence of several key players from the panel was a source of frustration for Farrell and co-manager Gerry Sheridan, he feels that the side will benefit greatly from their first year in senior championship football.
“Absolutely. We’re delighted with the effort they put in all year, in fairness to them. We’ve had set-back after set-back this year, losing so many players to America, injury and so on. We even lost two from the last day,” Farrell remarked.
“I suppose we sort of ran out of players, so to speak, out there today. It’s a learning experience for these girls. They gave a good account of themselves there today.”
“You go into senior level, and it’s a completely different ball game. It’s premier league football basically. It takes a number of years to get used to that. We put it down to experience and we’ll learn from it and bounce back.”
Although Laois did have nine points to spare over the Breffni girls in the end, it was actually a close-fought encounter for the most part. Martha Kirwin, Meaghan Dunne and Laura-Marie Maher all raised green flags for the O’Moore County, and Farrell felt that the concession of these goals proved to be vital in the end.
“Goals win games. We scored some the last day, and we conceded none. We conceded three today, and now that was the difference. Three goals that we would see as badly conceded goals on our behalf.”
“We had chances in the first half of scoring a few goals. We didn’t take the few chances we got. When you don’t do that at this level you’re punished, and they punished us,” Farrell added.