Brennan proud of his Louth players
Louth supremo happy with how his team applied themselves in big victory over Fermanagh
“I’m very proud of the lads and in particular over the last two weeks and the work the guys put in,” Louth manager Ger Brennan beamed after his side's impressive showing against Fermanagh on Saturday.
“As I’ve said before, they’re an extremely honest and hard-working group of players. We’ve had some hard and honest chats with each other over how we can help them improve and progress.”
“The two big areas we’ve looked at are; the scores conceded from frees and the unforced possession errors, which were incredibly high over the previous five games. Bar the Armagh match, where we conceded two scores from frees, we were averaging four-to-five frees which were scored from round two to five.”
“In possession, our unforced errors, we were averaging 40 possessions for 70 minutes but giving the ball away 18 times out of those 40. We worked hard on that here, to try and get it down. With those areas the focus, Brennan was further enthused by his side’s application of where Erne siders could be exposed.
“We countered quite quickly and capitalised on most of Fermanagh’s errors in the first half. What’s most pleasing is that we were able to keep concentration bar one or two silly shots in the second half.
“It was a great finish by Sam. In the Donegal match, which we studied, Fermanagh conceded a similar goal in the 42nd minute which turned the match in their favour. We capitalised on it here and it was a great, composed finish by Sam from a great distance out.”
Despite the crucial win, Brennan is aware that safety is not fully secure but posed a key question to his side beforehand. “We’re still in a relegation battle,” he said.
“It’s all about winning. Different facets of our game had improved as we went along and some areas had unimproved or not improved at all but we focused on that. Our disciplined tackling, use of the ball and concentration over the 70 minutes was quite good.”
“What we discussed really was ‘do you want to play in Division 3 next year or Division 2? To play against higher quality teams, knowing that you weren’t a million miles off pushing for promotion into Division 1, that was the question we put to the lads. Were they going to fight or fly? They fought and huge credit goes to the boys. They came out swinging and gave it their all.”