‘The next day is what it’s all about’ - Pearses manager
By Kevin Egan
The contest didn’t exactly set pulses racing, and the reaction of Pádraig Pearses manager Frank Canning certainly kept the same tone last Saturday.
After comfortably disposing of St Faithleach’s by 1-9 to 0-3, the man who managed his native Portumna to All-Ireland hurling glory in 2014 could have been forgiven for feeling quite optimistic about his team’s prospects of winning back the Fahey Cup, but instead he was all about keeping things on an even keel.
“Everyone says that semi-finals are all about winning, and they’re right, but it will be a different the next day. We’re only one step further than we were last year. It’s nice to win a semi-final, but you get no plaudits for winning a semi-final. The next day is what it’s all about,” said Canning.
On paper, a 0-6 to 0-1 half-time lead looked commanding. However with a strong breeze blowing down towards the town end of Dr Hyde Park, Canning was disappointed that his players had left St Faithleach’s within striking distance, given the potential for Diarmuid and Ciaráin Murtagh shooting the lights out with the wind at their backs.
“We were very poor in the first half,” Canning said. “We started well and we were four up after 11 minutes but we had a very poor 19 or 20 minutes after that. I’m not sure what it was. We made a lot of basic errors.
"We didn’t get the tempo of the game up. We didn’t move the ball fast enough. That’s just the way it was. We were worried at half-time but, thankfully, we went out in the second half and put in a good performance.
“I thought Faithleach’s played really well in the first half too, they controlled large parts of it. They were holding onto the ball well.
“Overall, I thought that we were comfortable in the second half. They looked better in an attacking sense in the first half than they did in the second. It’s the way it panned out,” he continued.
That’s the thing about an even keel – you don’t get too high or too low, and in that regard, Canning was perfectly consistent. He had faith in his team before they played St Brigid’s, and he was not getting carried away with that victory either, any more than he was about his team’s performance on Saturday.
“The reality was that a lot of Roscommon people were getting ahead of themselves with Brigid’s. They only won the county final last year by a point against Boyle, and Boyle only beat us by a point. So we always believed going into Brigid’s feeling that it was a 50/50 game.
"People in the media were blowing up Brigid’s when they didn’t deserve to be blown up. It was a good win, but we still had more to do then, and we have more work to do now too,” he added.