Football

Sloppy Slaughtneil sneak past Derrygonnelly Harps

Slaughtneil’s Christopher Bradley gets his pass away despite hitting the ground during yesterday’s Ulster Club SFC 
Slaughtneil’s Christopher Bradley gets his pass away despite hitting the ground during yesterday’s Ulster Club SFC  Slaughtneil’s Christopher Bradley gets his pass away despite hitting the ground during yesterday’s Ulster Club SFC 

AIB Ulster Club SFC quarter-final: Robert Emmet’s, Slaughtneil (Derry) 0-12 Derrygonnelly Harps (Fermanagh) 0-7

SLAUGHTNEIL managed to fend off their complacency by just enough to squeeze past Derrygonnelly and set up a meeting with Killyclogher in two weeks’ time.

After the high for their dual players of winning the Ulster hurling title last weekend, and last year’s 18-point win over this opposition at the back of their minds, Mickey Moran’s side produced as flat a championship display as has been seen in his reign.

A huge degree of credit has to go to Derrygonnelly for how they were able to frustrate the Derry champions. Far from the exposure their defence suffered last year, this time they suffocated the Derry champions with a wall of purple shirts.

At one stage they had all 15 players behind the ball snd throughout they tackled manically all over the pitch. They fouled, mostly, in smart areas. And in the first half, they had chances to leave themselves in a better position going in than a point behind.

Ultimately, their devotion to the defensive end of their plan was too great to allow them to score enough to win.

And with Brendan Rogers the outstanding player on the pitch driving out of the Emmet’s full-back line, the chances for Derrygonnelly became more and more limited as the game went on.

Slaughtneil assistant manager John Joe Kearney said that complacency was inevitable on the back of last year’s 18-point win over the same opposition, but wasn’t happy with the Emmet’s display.

“Not good enough, pure and simple. On today’s performance, it wasn’t good enough, but you get days like that,” he said.

“You can talk all you like about what you’re going to do but when you get out there, you might sit back a bit and think ‘we beat these boys easy enough last year, same today’. It wasn’t the same today again by any manner.

“I think that’s always going to be there a wee bit, no matter how much you talk about not having it. It’s natural it’s going to be there. So many men behind the ball was really where we had a problem. There were no big openings, it was tight.”

The Derrygonnelly display was a marked improvement on what they brought to the Ulster table 12 months ago, and the Celtic Park pitch, 10 yards narrower than Owenbeg, aided their defensive effort massively.

Throughout the first 30 minutes, Slaughtneil were almost waiting on the gaps to appear, but they never did. As a result, the 2014 Ulster champions were heavily reliant on three Paul Bradley frees to give them an interval lead.

Francis McEldowney, enjoying a real renaissance in more of a free role, bombed forward to poke over from 25 yards before Paul Bradley dropped a skyscraper on to the roof of the net to help Slaughtneil lead 0-3 to 0-1 early on.

But the visitors were lively and three scores in-a-row from play through Leigh, Garvan and Ryan Jones – the latter a superb effort from the sideline just inside the 45 – served notice that this was not 2015.

Garvan McGinley’s effort saw the Harps back in front after Paul Bradley’s free pulled Slaughtneil level and Derrygonnelly led into first half stoppage-time.

But another Bradley free was followed up by Patsy Bradley matching his opposite number Ryan Jones’s earlier effort from beneath the stand to send Slaughtneil in 0-6 to 0-5 ahead.

And seconds after the restart, Patsy Bradley was black-carded for a drag down on Jones. Having let the tie flow relatively well up until that, Noel Mooney set a different tone with that decision and moments later, he also black-carded Derrygonnelly’s Maurice Cassidy.

Paul Ward then picked up two yellow cards in the space of seven minutes to leave the Ernemen down to 14, and that effectively undid their attacking hopes. They scored just once, from a Garvan Jones free, in the final 25 minutes.

“A moral victory is no good really. We came here with full intentions of winning the game and we were well in the game,” said Derrygonnelly joint-manager Michael Glynn.

“We had a gameplan and we stuck to it. We wanted to defend deep and break at speed. But you have to be converting your chances. We missed too many frees. We created the chances and got frees, but we didn’t convert them and that’s the sad thing,” he said.

Eventually pockets of space began to open for Slaughtneil, though there were still only three points in it up until Karl McKaigue slotted over from a tight angle two minutes into stoppage time.

There were six minutes added after the unfortunate Paudie McGuigan, who’s battled back from two cruciate knee ligament injuries in recent seasons, suffered a suspected broken ankle in an innocuous incident at midfield.

A flat end to a back-to-earth kind of day for Slaughtneil. Their hopes of completing an unprecedented Ulster treble of hurling, camogie and football remain alive, but there is some improving to do.