FERMANAGH boss Ryan McMenamin says he will accept full responsibility if his attacking brand of football doesn’t keep the Ernemen in Division Two this year – but hopes his side will react in the same manner as Tyrone and Cavan did when their backs were to the wall earlier in their NFL campaigns.
Fermanagh suffered a crushing 13-point defeat to Armagh on home soil last weekend which edges them closer to the trap door and Tier Two football this summer.
Under former manager Rory Gallagher, Fermanagh played ultra-defensive football but it kept them in Division Two and also delivered an Ulster final berth in 2018.
Tyrone native McMenamin, who assisted Gallagher before taking the managerial reins this season, insists that Fermanagh had no choice but to try to evolve their defensive game-plan.
“It’s like everything else, you want to put your own stamp on it,” said the three-times All-Ireland winner.
“You look at the defensive teams and, yes, they get you to a certain point but they don’t get you to the point where you want to be. There probably has been a sea-change [in thinking] and you look at the new back-pass to the goalkeeper being banned. There has been more emphasis on attacking and you have to realise a lot of the teams are catching onto how to play against defensive-minded teams.
“They’re not stupid any more.”
Fermanagh sit on just two points after five games, with two fixtures remaining – Clare (a) and Laois (h). Their only success this winter was the smash-and-grab win over Roscommon while shipping defeats to Kildare (2-12 to 0-14), Westmeath (0-10 to 0-8), Cavan (2-11 to 1-11) and Armagh (3-14 to 0-10).
“Silly mistakes have cost us, very silly mistakes,” McMenamin said. “But you live by the sword - you die by the sword. You want to be expansive. But we’ve just been making errors and where we should be tackling we probably aren’t.
“We could have gone with 15 behind the ’45. We talked about this with Rory and we knew it was only going to take us to a certain level. In saying that, it kept us in Division Two last year. Is my style going to keep us in Division Two? I don’t know. You’re just going to be brave about it and if doesn’t work, it’s going to be my mistake and no-one else’s. And I’ll put my hand up on it.”
“You ask yourselves questions all the time,” the Dromore man added.
“If there was a resignation letter there last Saturday night I probably wouldn’t have signed it, but I would’ve looked at it a long time. Look, I’ve been with the boys for a long time and they do put a lot of effort into it. I send the boys out there and set them up and if we lose I have to ship the blame. A lot of it falls on me and that’s probably why I was feeling like that after Saturday night’s defeat.”
In trying to implement a more attacking strategy, McMenamin said: “To the players, it’s new. But when you lose the ball you still have to work back. At times Dublin work with 15 men behind the ball and there are times Tyrone work with 15 behind the ball. It is going to take time. But I’m not stupid; we're going to have to tweak certain things and do different stuff.
“You look at Kieran McGeeney; he’s been with Armagh for six or seven years and he was adamant about his way of playing in his first couple of seasons, especially when results weren’t going his way, he wanted to go a certain way, and you probably see his work coming to fruition.”
After falling behind to a third minute Jamie Clarke goal last Saturday night in Enniskillen, Fermanagh didn’t register a score until the 26th minute before conceding a further two goals in the second period.
“At the time you do take those defeats hard. At the end of the day we were out-fought on the pitch and you have to be man enough to say that. We were out-fought and, tactically, Kieran [McGeeney] and Jim McCorry got it better than us. You take it a wee bit personally and you ask yourself: ‘Am I doing enough for these boys? Is the training good enough? Is the way we’re sat up good enough?’
“I watched the game back on Sunday and you look for positives in it. We’d 70-plus minutes to win it - even after Jamie Clarke’s goal we still had 65-plus minutes to do something about it and didn’t. So, look, we can’t cry about it now. All we can worry about is the 70 minutes ahead of us in Clare.”
The Banner County breathed new life into their crack at competing in Tier One this summer after upsetting high-flying Cavan in their last league outing to move away from the bottom.
Despite Fermanagh's perilous position in Division Two, McMenamin is hoping his players can take inspiration from how Cavan and Tyrone bounced back from being rock bottom earlier in the League season.
After suffering a 13-point mauling to Armagh in their opener, Mickey Graham’s Cavan side made a remarkable recovery to put themselves in the promotion frame, while the Red Hands beat All-Ireland champions Dublin a week after surrendering to Galway in Tuam.
“I don’t think Mickey Graham or Mickey Harte did anything magical in the space of five days because it’s impossible to do. We’ll see what our players are made of against Clare on Sunday.”
Full-back Che Cullen and midfielder Eoin Donnelly could be fit for the trip to Ennis after both missed the Armagh defeat through injury.
