Kildare regroup after Derry blow with eyes firmly on Cavan challenge

Kildare’s youthful senior footballers were offered a few valuable lessons by a battle-hardened Derry outfit on a chaotic evening in the Cedral St Conleth’s Park cauldron on Saturday evening. The direction of their season will depend on how much they learn from those mistakes.

In the long run, if those lessons are absorbed and acted upon, it will have been worth the two points left behind in their first defeat from three games, but Brian Flanagan and his management team will need to address the return of the glaring weaknesses that this team has demonstrated over the last year.

Firstly, a susceptibility to teams running directly at the heart of the Kildare defence. Once numerical parity was restored after Alex Beirne’s red card for indiscretions unknown and Derry decided to play football again, the ease with which they cut through the inexperienced home defence was instructive, but not unfamiliar, and two quickfire goals shortly after the interval put them back in command of a game that was going away from them.

Secondly, despite Conor Glass seeing red after only six minutes and Derry spending nineteen first half minutes with a man down, and a further ten minutes two men short, the Oak Leaf County somehow managed to win 14 out of 24 first half kickouts and with parity restored in the second half they upped their win rate to 15 out of 23. That’s a 62% win-rate overall.

You can’t lay all kickout weaknesses entirely at a goalkeeper’s door but with the concession of three goals to add to two in Omagh, Cian Burke may feel the shadow of Aaron O’Neill looming large ahead of the trip to Cavan next Sunday.

Burke may argue he was left with little protection for Derry’s goals, the second one from Paul Cassidy being a particular case in point. While the wing-forward’s finish was out of the top drawer no player at this level should be allowed to travel as far as he did (from midfield). Video analysis will no doubt highlight the poor efforts of two Kildare players to make a tackle worthy of the name on the goalscorer.

There were positives. When Derry were self-destructing after Shane McGuigan’s goal put them five clear, the home side took control of the second quarter, scoring 1-6 without reply into the wind, though Brian McLoughlin’s goal was fortuitous, a point attempt from a 25-metre free dipping into the wind and deceiving goalkeeper Shea McGuckin.

Ben Loakman had a red-letter day in his nascent county career with a ten-point haul. Derry could not handle the Sarsfields man’s swerves and dummies in the opening half when he landed four almost identical points from the right side into the wind and in the second his two orange flags were crucial to keeping his team in touch. A big career beckons.

The walking wounded continued the long road to full fitness with four coming off the bench, though rustiness hampered their impact, particularly in the case of Darragh Kirwan who couldn’t find the target when Kildare really needed a couple of big scores. Jack McKevitt, Neil Flynn and James McGrath were others to get their first minutes of the league campaign though the exit of Kevin Feely with a tight hamstring will cause concern. As will the possibility of a suspension to attacking talisman Beirne. Kildare have appealed his second off and that is due to be heard on Thursday evening and his loss, even for just one game, would be a big blow. 

Flanagan as ever was sanguine about the whole affair, though ruing the first ten minutes after the interval when he thought his team were flat and “didn’t bring the energy on the back foot that’s needed against a strong running team like Derry.” Setbacks were to be expected with a panel containing only 12 players out of 35 who as of Saturday night have played 20 games or more for the seniors.

“We said at the start of the league we’ll win games, lose games and draw games. We’ve done all three of them in the first three games and it’s going to be a kind of a rollercoaster,” he told the Kildare Nationalist afterwards.

All of which leads us to Kingspan Breffni for what has become a crucial encounter on Sunday with Cavan’s loss to Tyrone leaving them alongside Offaly at the bottom of the table with zero points. A win for Kildare would go a long way to cementing their place in the second tier for next year.