Last chance saloon for Boyle’s men

By Shaun Casey

KNOCKOUT football has reached the Mourne County and Clann na Banna boss John Boyle doesn’t want their season to come to an end just yet.

Having narrowly lost to Annaclone in Monday night’s round one clash, it’s now last chance saloon for Clann na Banna, who take on St John’s Bosco at Clonduff on Sunday afternoon.

The Warrenpoint clubman is in his first season at the helm of the Banbridge club, and they survived the trap door at the bottom of Division Two by the skin of their teeth.

“The real championship football starts now. purists probably like the straight knockout element of the championship more than anything else. it’s do or die time now and that’ll give it a bit of an extra edge,” Boyle said.

Reflecting on their two-point defeat to Annaclone, 1-13 to 0-14, Boyle recognises there are improvements that can be made, but they don’t have much room to manoeuvre with the short six-day turnaround.

“There were parts of the game that we were really good, that we would have been pleased with, but there were parts where, on reflection, if we’re being really harsh about it, we need to improve on massively,” Boyle added.

“Annaclone are a really competitive team and had a really good season and they’ll be there or thereabouts at the tail end of the championship.

“We’ll be trying to take the positives out of it, for example what we did for the vast majority of the game. We’ll try to rectify the last five or ten minutes and look for the reasons why we ended up losing the game.

“We’ll look to improve and I think we’ll be stronger for it. I hope that we’ll have one or two players back this week, so we’ll definitely have a stronger group moving forward.”

St John’s Bosco stand between them and the next round. tnd lost out to Liatroim last Saturday afternoon despite kicking six goals on the day on a scoreline of 1-24 to 6-7.

“You look at that scoreline and the six goals and you know that they have a serious threat up front. They have a couple of young fellas that have good pedigree and have a bit of quality about them,” Boyle continued. “We’ll definitely not be taking anything lightly, but I think it’s important that we put 99 per cent of the focus on us. If we can get ourselves right then everything else can take care of itself.”