Henderson pleased to take three points from game
REACTION
Daire Walsh
FOLLOWING their recent defeats to Limerick and UCD, Cobh Ramblers manager Stephen Henderson was pleased to get back to winning ways against Cabinteely at Stradbrook last night.
Henderson made a number of positional switches to his team for this trip to Dublin, and he felt that there were a number of positives throughout the course of their impressive 2-1 victory.
“We’re happy with the three points. We changed our back-four around tonight and our midfield, just to try and get a response for what happened between the Limerick and UCD games. I think we got that. Rob [Lehane] was playing out wide on the wing, and he was phenomenal out there,” Henderson remarked.
“The two boys, Cian [Kingston] and Kaka [Christopher McCarthy], played centre-half. That was their first time doing it for us, and they did really well. We were delighted with them, and then young Charlie Flemming, 17, playing right-back. There was a lot of positives to take out of it.”
However, Henderson was highly critical of the state of the pitch in Stradbrook, and he believes that they need to re-adjust their style of play under certain circumstances.
“We’re still trying to play too much football to be honest with you. The pitch is an absolute disgrace. I’m a fine one to be talking about that with our pitch, but that [Stradbrook] pitch is awful. There’s no way you should be trying to play football, but it’s inbred into some of our players.
“That they want to play football, play those little one-twos and what have you. We’re trying to get it out of them in circumstances like this. We didn’t do it, and we started putting ourselves under a bit of pressure over it.”
Nevertheless, after Ben Hanrahan’s goal had offered Cabinteely a lifeline, Cobh coped extremely well under pressure, and Henderson praised his players for eradicating some of the errors that had occurred in previous games.
“All told, our midfield, we were saying we didn’t win enough second balls against the UCDs and the Limericks. It’s something that we worked on in training. Our back-four didn’t win enough headers, they did tonight. There was a lot of positives in that. When they did put the pressure on us, we held up well,” Henderson added.