If we beat kildare nobody will be thinking about the ulster final minor manager

Damian McCarney

After a painful defeat in the Ulster Championship decider on Sunday, Cavan Minors must now regroup and prepare for their Bank Holiday crunch match against Kildare.
Eager not to dwell on the Derry defeat, they met up on Monday night for a pool session and a team meeting “to get it out of the system”, as manager Danny Brady put it.
“As far as we’re concerned, the Derry game is over now and we’ll just look forward to the Kildare game. We keep emphasising to the boys - we were beaten in the Ulster final, but we’re in the last eight in the country and we’re into a different competition now - it’s the All Ireland Qualifiers. There’s only eight teams left and we want to be one of the last four after the next round.
“As [team selector] Larry [Reilly] said after the game, if we beat Kildare, nobody will be thinking about the Ulster final; all they will be thinking about is the All Ireland semi-final.

'That’s the way we are focusing now. We move on, we can’t do anything about it. What’s done is done an let’s move on and try to take Kildare down.”
The Kildare match is pencilled in for some stage of the Bank Holiday weekend, but the date, time and venue are unlikely to be fixed until this weekend’s senior matches are concluded.

'Mistakes'

Whilst Sunday’s match is in the past, Danny Brady was gracious enough to reflect on what occurred in St Tiernach’s Park.
Derry’s cautious gameplan, clinically executed saw them dominate the provincial decider. An economy of possession and accuracy of shooting - most notably Tiarnan Flanagan’s mastery of tight angles to crash the ball in for the game’s only goal - saw the Oakleafers surge into a six point lead before the half-time break.
Danny observes that his Cavan team’s uncharacteristic off-day contributed to the challenge they faced at half-time.
“I’m sure a lot of them didn’t fulfil their potential on Sunday but overall the second half we really took the game to Derry. In the first half we made a few basic mistakes that we hadn’t been making over the last few of years - for whatever reason those mistakes were happening. But look, it’s all part of the learning curve.”

Positives

While disappointed by the result, the fact that Cavan rose to the daunting challenge and scored five of the last six points of the match meant Danny didn’t have to look too hard to find the positives from their display.
“We’ll have to take positives from the second half. We were six points down, and then to limit them to three points in the second half. And have the lion’s share of possession - we had over 70-80% possession - in the second half, we just didn’t convert some of them. We were panicking, trying to claw that goal back when maybe a point was a better option, but definitely the positives are the fighting spirit and the way the boys kept battling.”