Rovers made Ramblers pay for poor display, admits Coleman
SOCCER
Daire Walsh
FOLLOWING a 5-0 defeat at the hands of Shamrock Rovers in the U19 Southern Elite Division on Saturday, Cobh Ramblers manager Declan Coleman acknowledged that his side’s performance wasn’t good enough.
Ramblers had entered the contest at the top of the table, and even though there were encouraging signs in the opening stages of the game, Coleman felt the goals they conceded in the first-half were avoidable ones.
“The whole performance just wasn’t good enough really. In fairness, I thought we were the better team for the first half an hour. They scored a goal that we should have defended a little bit better,” Coleman remarked.
“We got caught one-on-one at the back, and we should have gone and actually tried to clear the ball instead of trying to take it down and play it out. Heads dropped then, and the second goal was poor, from our point of view. We left them with a free header just outside the six-yard box.”
Four consecutive wins had given Cobh a slight advantage over UCD and Cork City heading into the recent mid-season break, but this reversal sees them dropping back down to second place. Coleman believes that four weeks without game-time was a factor in their performance, but doesn’t fully explain their overall drop in standards.
“It has a little bit of a factor. We had some guys who missed quite a bit of training due to exams. Our numbers weren’t as high as they should have been. It may have had something to do with it, because I think we looked sluggish.
“Regardless of that, the players should be still fit enough and capable of dealing with the level of the game required at this level. We were sitting top of the league for a reason, because we had set that standard, and we just didn’t meet that standard today.”
Before resuming their Southern Elite campaign at home to Bray Wanderers on Sunday week, Cobh will face Munster rivals Waterford United in a League Cup encounter this weekend. While this means they can’t immediately focus on getting their league ambitions back on track, Coleman is still looking forward to the challenge possessed by Waterford.
“We’re going to have to just dust ourselves down and recover from it. We’ll just use the cup game as an opportunity to do that, hopefully.” Coleman said.
“We were hoping to give ourselves a stronger position. There’s a few more things we need to put right rather than things that went well and we can build on. Looking forward to next week already.”