THE scoreboard at the final whistle is seldom accused of perjury and last Sunday evening at Kingspan Breffni Park, Kingscourt Stars boss Niall Lynch offered no case for the defence... or his midfield or his attack.
Kilcoo’s facile 3-15 to 0-5 win was a real Halloween horror show for both Kingscourt and Cavan football. Lynch confessed the result was a poor reflection of what the Cavan champions brought to the table on the day.
“It was a bad day at office for us, big time, and I don’t think their winning margin flattered them,” Lynch said.
“If you go through our team, player by player, you would do well to find any more than three players that played well, that played to their potential. That’s the major reason why we lost and that’s why the margin of victory ended up being as big it was. Apart from Peter Corrigan and Cian McArdle our forward line just didn’t function. In the first 18 minutes we actually hit three or four decent balls up to our full-forward line that didn’t stick and then their goal came.
“I think the majority of their scores came from errors we committed when we had possession. In Ulster club when have you have possession, you have got to retain possession and we didn’t do that well enough.”
The fact that Kingscourt went into the game as standard bearers for Cavan football wasn’t lost on Lynch as the Kilcoo players filed past his dressing-room with faces that suggested that they also couldn’t quite take in the lop-sided nature of the final scoreline.
Honest and generous in defeat, Lynch nonetheless exuded an aura of revivalist zeal. His side were better than they showed themselves to be and, given another chance, would prove it.
“We’re disappointed with our performance but we feel on another day we could match Kilcoo,” he said.
“There’s no doubt we’ve some catching up to do with the likes of Kilcoo. From what I hear, there’s a tremendous bond among them, that they were devastated to have been caught out by Clontibret last year and I suppose we suffered because of that.”
And Lynch suggested that Cavan football fans ought not read too much into Kilcoo’s facile win. The Belturbet-based secondary school teacher pointed to Ballyhaise’s close-run thing with Doohamlet (Monaghan) in their Ulster club IFC tie and to Templeport’s victorious JFC opening round win in Donegal last Sunday as reasons to be optimistic if not exactly cheerful. But what of the seniors?
“We are very disappointed with both our performance and with the margin of our defeat and it is a poor reflection on the Cavan champions of the day,” he added.
“The fact is that we underperformed collectively and there wasn’t enough of our men who won enough of their individual battles. There is no need for doom and gloom as regards Cavan football, just on the back of Kilcoo’s win; there’s no need for major surgery just yet.”
On a day in which Kingscourt only managed two points from open play, Lynch underscored the notion that forwards win matches.
“What I would say is that all clubs in Cavan need to look at scoring more,” he said.
“At club level we don’t seem to be scoring enough and the quality of forward on display for Kilcoo is different to the quality of forward playing regularly at club level in Cavan. In Cavan we need to discover better ways of getting more scores.”
