Improving Derry making all the right steps

THERE are two ways to judge Derry’s season ahead of their trip to Offaly for their final Division Four game on Sunday.

A look at the league table tells you it’s another season in which a victory over Kilkenny is their only win.

It’s their scoring average of -10 that tells a different story. A look back over the 10 years before 2026 and it’s a massive improvement from an average of -62 per year.

Derry were a whisker from earning a draw on Sunday with top of the table Leitrim. It was the same on their travels in Wicklow.

Their 14-point defeat in Carlow is the only outlier, a day when they rotated their panel and ended up winning the second half.

Management duo Seamus Shivers and Greg McArdle added Leo Sweeney this year. Collectively, they made the decision to lay their foundations in defence.

It has worked. It has made them competitive and they’re now been working on the transition to attack.

Ballinascreen’s Amy-Rose Mulligan is in her first full season on the panel.

Derry pushed Antrim hard in the Ulster Championship last year and there was a happy vibe ebbing from the camp.

“That’s why I did come out this year,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation whenever you’re maybe not getting the results.

“Anyone I was speaking to last year said it was great and then I think this year we’ve been building on that.”

“We’re all really close and we’ve shifted the focus away from going to go out and win these games. We’ve been setting ourselves goals of what we want to achieve in a match.”

Cleaning up the concession of goals was the first area of focus, which was put in place with a collective ownership of buying what the management were selling.

“Last year, I think we were conceding four goals a game on average,” Mulligan pointed out of last season.

“That was like something we looked at from the start, to work on our defence. If you look at the first few games, we didn’t concede many goals. By the third game we had come to terms with the defence.

“We are now obviously looking to get scores on the board as well, so we’ve turned our focus to that. We’re looking at that things like that and the results will look after themselves.”

On the outside, many will see a league campaign with one win over Kilkenny as the way it always was.

It’s not something the squad are bothered about but it’s something they are striving to change. Their initial targets are more important.

“If you look at the scores we were getting beat by last year and previous years, then look at the difference now,” Mulligan explains.

“Against Leitrim, we thought we had drawn the game. Even though we got beat by a point there was still a buzz after it.

“They’re (Leitrim) top of the table and probably going to get promoted. They beat everybody else by a lot more than they beat us.

“We’re going in the right direction and we just need to keep working on it and it will click.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’re not going to go from being bottom of Division Four to suddenly winning every game.

“Every week, we’ve been improving and we know we have the players. We also have that bond that we need, so it’ll just keep building on that, then, hopefully come the championship we’ll start to see some results.”