McGill confident Derry can progress to the semi-finals

By Shaun Casey

IT’S all on the line this Sunday afternoon at Páirc Grattan, Inniskeen as Derry and Meath are set to battle it out for a place in the All-Ireland Intermediate Championship semi-finals, and Áine McGill is embracing the challenge.

When they travelled to the Kingdom two weeks ago in the final round-robin match, McGill admits that Derry fancied their chances of securing an away day win, but they came up short on the day.

And they know all about the task that is ahead of them having crossed paths with Meath plenty of times in recent years. McGill was a member of the Derry team that beat the Royals in an All-Ireland Intermediate decider just three years ago.

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“This weekend is a fixture that we maybe didn’t expect to play – we thought we probably would have got a result over Kerry to be honest,” said the Derry midfielder.

“It is what it is now and we’re definitely looking forward to it. We’ve played Meath a good bit over recent years and we’d be confident that we’ll be able to get over the line.

“With the group games you always have a bit of a safety net, especially as we were in the seeded group, but we’re well aware that it’s all-or-nothing this weekend and there’s no room for an incomplete performance.”

Derry picked up one point in the group stages arising from a draw with Down in round two, which came in between defeats to Antrim and Kerry.

“Since the league finished and going into the Ulster Championship, we knew we had Antrim (in the semi-final) and then again in the All-Ireland Championship. There was a lot of preparation around Easter time going into that,” she added.

“I suppose we would have been happy with our performance in most parts of those games, but there were periods that let us down.

“We played very well for most of the game against Down and there were just small periods where we didn’t perform and you could say the same about the Kerry game, we had a bad second half.

“We’re aware that there is no room for that now because it will end the season if we don’t have a complete 60-minute performance on Sunday.”

Concerns

Derry are carrying a few injury concerns heading into the crunch weekend, but McGill hopes that they have a strong enough panel to get across the line and compete in the last four.

“There are a couple of players that are going to be missing out but we still have a strong panel,” she continued.

“We’ve been dealing with that all year so we have plenty of players that can slot into different positions. We know what we’re dealing with at this stage, so we’ll be able to manage it.”