James Laverty is confident Antrim can bounce back from the disappointment of losing last Saturday's Allianz League Division 4 final to Louth in Croke Park.

The Saffrons have three weeks to refocus and right the wrongs for their Ulster SFC preliminary round clash with Fermanagh on May 15.

"We went there with the full intention of winning," the defender explained to the Irish News. 

"But things just didn't work out in the end. We took the foot off the pedal and just never got it back on. But it's only one game, so we have plenty to work on. There's no lying about feeling sorry for ourselves. If we do that, Fermanagh could give us a tanking, so we've got to stay positive. We were back out training on Monday night."

The two main areas of concern for managers Frank Fitzsimons and Gearoid Adams will be the relative ease with which Louth were able to break Antrim down and the 23-minute period of the second-half during which their charges did not score.

Antrim's 23-minute scoring lull in the second half highlighted deficiencies in the Antrim performance.

"That was a worrying point,, but we were sort of glad maybe that it happened then," Laverty continued.

"Maybe it won't happen again in three weeks' time, which is the big one. That would be an area that we would probably need to work on for the next couple of weeks. Definitely in the second half, their tactic was to drive the ball in long on top of their big men.

"I suppose it worked to an extent. I think, with the first goal - we were a bit disappointed with [how] the boy crept in. Nobody saw him and then the second one - to be fair, it was a good finish, but it probably could have been easily prevented if we had maybe worked a bit harder.

"But the third one - I thought boys were just out on their feet at the end. They were trying to get forward, but the energy was gone. All year, we had prided ourselves on not conceding and the last game just didn't show that."

Tweet

Most Read Stories