O’Mullan’s Orchard out to make it two in a row

FOLLOWING on from their first-round victory away to Roscommon, PJ O’Mullan’s Armagh will be looking to make it two from two when they host Louth at the BOX-IT Athletic Grounds on Saturday afternoon.

O’Mullan admits that his team are facing into the unknown as they haven’t crossed paths with the Wee County in recent seasons. Armagh head into the game as heavy favourites to capture the three points on offer.

The Orchard ladies earned an opening day win over the Rossies with 11 points to spare while Louth suffered a huge defeat at the hands of Tyrone with 25 points the difference between the sides in the end.

“We’re in a good place, things have picked up in the past six to eight weeks,” said O’Mullan. “We had some good challenge games and played well in the Ulster Senior Championship. We got off to a good start the last day so we’re hoping to keep the momentum going.

“It’s the complete unknown this week. We’ve looked at their results and we know one or two of their players, but we’ve just focused on ourselves for this game. We had 20 players that played the last day, and we have a panel of 27. The seven players that didn’t play the last day, we’re looking at giving them game-time on Saturday. After this weekend everyone in the panel will have gotten some game-time and hopefully all the girls that are getting a chance can step up to the mark.”

Armagh had six different names on the scoresheet against Roscommon, with the accurate Rachael Merry top scoring with 0-8. Sinead Quinn, Niamh Forker and Megan O’Callaghan all raised green flags on the day as well.

“We had a nice spread of scorers, and I suppose the beauty of it is that we probably missed as much as we scored so there’s plenty to work on. We’re creating chances so if we create the same chances this week and take a few more we’ll hopefully knock up a big score.”

Armagh were relegated from Division Two in the league, finishing bottom of the table with zero points, but O’Mullan believes those games at a higher level, against better opponents, will stand to his team in the All-Ireland Premier Junior competition.

“We just didn’t have enough time with them really, we didn’t get enough work done pre-league,” added O’Mullan, in his first season in charge of the team. “We were very competitive and in four of the five games, with two minutes to go we were only a score behind.

“We collapsed in the last couple of minutes, but we’ve played a decent couple of challenge games since against Down, Westmeath, Loughgiel and we played Derry in the Ulster Championship. We’re hoping all of those games against better opposition will stand to us.”