Carr: Down’s challenge is ‘above the shoulders’

By Niall Gartland

IF Down legend Ross Carr has one message to impart before Saturday’s Tailteann Cup opener against Leitrim, it’s this – football sure is a fickle business.

The Mourne Men were the talk of the country after a stunning victory against Donegal in the first round of the Ulster Championship. And then the very next weekend they were dismantled by Armagh – a double whammy as their All-Ireland status was snatched away as a result.

So what exactly is the truth of the situation? Ross Carr says we need to remember that the evidence always suggested that Down weren’t among the elite bracket.

“For anybody not inside the camp, you don’t have the facts. You don’t know exactly what’s going on.

“Everything is just a bit of supposition or guesswork. With the benefit of hindsight, 24 hours makes an awful difference in sport, and people’s opinions change within a very short period of time.

“On the Saturday before the Armagh match, everybody outside of the camp, without knowing what was going on, was thinking, ‘jeez, Down can maybe put it up to Armagh if they reproduce that level of performance.’ Then, 24 hours later, it was the complete opposite. It was a flash in the pan. Then it was, ‘What happened to Donegal?’

“What I would say is that, over the last couple of years, Down have played in Division Three and while it’s been competitive, the intensity of those games, week in, week out, is nowhere near the intensity of playing in Division One. So you can’t go from being a Division Two or Division Three team to competing with the best teams in the country on a consistent basis.

“Everybody has a big game in them. Again, if we take the benefit of hindsight, Dublin only beat Wicklow by a couple of points in the Leinster Championship, but Laois beat Wicklow in the Tailteann Cup at the weekend, so where did that level of performance go to?”

According to Carr, one factor in their unravelling against Armagh was a demanding run of fixtures. The Down players boarded a plane to Farranfore to play Kerry in a challenge match as preparation for their meeting with Donegal. That set up an Ulster Championship semi-final against 2024 All-Ireland champions Armagh, and this all transpired, remember, in the space of three manic weeks.

“You have to add in that they were playing Donegal, who in the space of a couple of weeks went from being the second most fancied team in Ireland to favourites for the All-Ireland after their league victory over Kerry.

“And Down played Kerry the week before. Whether Kerry got anything out of it, Down certainly got a lot out of it. Within two weeks, they had played two of the best three teams in the country. Then, over a three-week period, they had played the top three teams in the country.

“What I’m thinking is that they weren’t able to sustain that level of performance because they had never been asked to sustain it in the last three or four years. It was just too much. It unravelled.

“I would feel sorry for any player on the receiving end of a defeat like that. Anybody who has ever played sport knows that when you get one of those days, it’s a horrible place to be. You can’t blow the game up early. You have to stay on the pitch for the duration, and you know every minute isn’t going to get better – it’s going to get worse.”

So the Tailteann Cup is Down’s lot. They take on Steven Poacher’s Leitrim this Saturday evening at Páirc Esler and while it’s not the premier competition, the prize on offer for the overall winners is a guaranteed spot in next year’s All-Ireland series. Down know well that they can’t afford to leave that to chance.

Carr said: “The good thing is that there have been a couple of weeks to recover from it. They go into a game now on Saturday evening that, if you were looking at league performances and league standings, they should win.

“But if you look at all the results at the weekend in the Tailteann Cup, some of them went to extra time, but all of them were close. So I don’t expect it to be a landslide victory, but I’d be hoping that Down would be good enough to win.

“Down supporters have to be realistic. Down management have to be realistic. This is a situation where you get over the line and then move on to the next game.”

Above all, Carr believes the psychological response will define Down’s Tailteann campaign.

“What’s important here isn’t what’s below the shoulders – it’s what’s above it.

“Even with being in Division Two next year, there’s no guarantee they’ll be in the All-Ireland series. The goal at this stage is to win the Tailteann Cup.

“The challenge that management and players face is this: can we focus for the next five or six weeks? Whatever number of games are left to play, can we produce a performance in each of those games that’s good enough to win, using each week as a stepping stone to get to the next one?”