By Shaun Casey

DERRY’S league preparations have been severally hampered this season, with both Sleacht Néill and Banagher enjoying successful club championship campaigns.

Dominic McKinley, joint manager with Cormac Donnelly, describes their preseason as “indifferent”.

“It’s good for them, the two were involved in the club championship. That takes a surplus of players away and we’re down to the bare bones. We’re looking at maybe 20 players outside of them and we’ve picked up three of four injuries so you’ve 12 or 14 players constantly.

“To be fair to the boys they trained hard and we’re going as well as we can. We’ll hopefully have the rest of the boys back in for the match at the weekend.

“We linked up with the u-20s with Kevin Kelly. We have an understanding with him, trying to get one or two of them boys but there’s a big step up from what they were doing.”

The Oak Leaf County take on Sligo in the opening round of the league, in a repeat of the 2021 Christy Ring Cup semi-final, which Derry won.

McKinley and his men will enjoy home advantage, the start of three home games they will have throughout the campaign.

“It helps, it helps immensely (home advantage). Make no bones about it, you target your homes games, and you expect to win them and so do the players.

“The match with Sligo last year was touch and go and we’ll not be looking any further than that. I suppose if we’re setting ourselves realistic targets we’d like to get to the final of that league, I’m not really into targets. I’m into more so game by game and the attitude of players and making sure we’re up for it.

“I think everything else will follow suit. If we’re at ourselves and working hard and training hard and all players on the same hymn sheet, there’s every possibility we could win most of these games.”

After defeating Sligo last year, Derry were beaten heavily in the Christy Ring Cup by Offaly and that will help them push on again this season.

“It’s one of the ambitions we’d have, to win the Christy Ring. We also know how hard it was and probably last year we set out to get to the final and I think everybody being realistic, we came up short, big time.

“Every so often you need that to realise you need to raise your standards again, so that was an eye opener for us all.”