Trainer Niall Moyna reveals why Down returned to training later than everybody else.

The Mourne County had an extended winter break, which may have cost them their place in Division One, but Monaghan native Moyna hopes it will leave James McCartan's men sharper for the championship:

"We decided to wait until the end of December-early January," he tells The Independent. "Hopefully because of that, with a lot of teams starting much earlier, there's a bit of freshness about us.

"It's only in the last two weeks we've really started championship training, rather than having started months ago. It's a bit new to them.

"We probably started training later than any of the other Division One teams. And we were leading in all but one of our games at half time.

"I think fitness came back to haunt us in a lot of those games and we got to play a lot of players; we were obviously missing six or seven regulars.

"So it was a great opportunity to run the rule over a few new players, and from that perspective it was nice. For me it was nice, it gave me a chance to bed in as well.

"We would have liked to stay in Division One obviously, that was our aim. But that's the way the dice rolled." Tweet

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