This article is from page 103 of the 2007-03-13 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 103 JPG
WHAT goes up must come down. After the high of victory over Kerry in the under 21 grade, the low of a 13 point drubbing at the hands of a rampant Monaghan.
Standing in the grey gloom outside the Clare dressing room, the rain pouring down around him, Banner boss Paidi O’Shea picked positives out of an awful day for Clare foot- eye
“It isn’t a major setback. I haven’t seen the rest of the results yet. We’re on four points and there will be a lot of better teams than us on four points around the league. We’d think that there is a good opportunity to get an-
other two points against London and we have games to come against Of- faly and Longford, so nobody knows just yet. We’ll have a look at it and see,’ he said
“We lived on the edge for a while in the first half. We never got going and Monaghan could have punished us further. We were playing catch up after 20 minutes. We can have no complaints, they were completely better than us. We lost a shower of players through injury and any team is going to miss players. Maybe if we had Michael O’Shea a bit earlier it would have given us a bit more. We are missing other players like Alan Malone and Stephen Hickey.”
Meanwhile, his counterpart Sea-
mus McEneaney revealed the way Clare were on their last visit to Ennis was a powerful motivating force for them. ““We were determined to put right what happened when we came here two years ago,” he said.
“We weren’t treated right that day; we weren’t even allowed to warm up on the pitch beforehand. We came down early yesterday, we got here around 10.30am. The lads were re- ally focused that was the most com- plete 74 minutes of football I’ve seen from us this year.
“We came down here with a mis- sion and that was to still be top of the league after the match. Things didn’t go our way before this match either. We didn’t have a place to warm up beforehand so we had to go on a bit of land that the Council owned and then the Guards showed up to move us on. So if we needed anymore mo- tivation that was the final nail. I have waited two years to talk to you guys about what happened, and get that of my chest,” he added.
Clare could do with some similar motivation.