Niall Carew calls on Sligo football veterans to battle on

Sligo manager Niall Carew will be calling on Mark Breheny and his other batch of ‘vets’ to stay on in 2016 so that the Connacht side can build on what he views as a season of promise.

In truth, it was a so-so campaign at best, one in which a shock defeat of Roscommon in the Connacht semi-final was sandwiched between a mediocre league run in Division Three and the annihilation by Mayo in the provincial decider.

This seven-point loss to Tyrone was more comprehensive than the scoreboard suggests but Carew wasn’t too downbeat in the aftermath on Saturday.

“Mark Breheny covered every blade of grass (against Tyrone) and I’d be encouraging him to stay on as captain next year again. He is a massive leader. He would have been a little disappointed with his Connacht final performance but he led from start to finish.

“We’ll have to take the positives out of it, but with the Brehenys and Marrens to drive on with us… We just put in the structures for the players to follow and we can build on it.” It has been a year of learning for Carew.

Sligo, with its population of roughly 60,000, has only a quarter of the personnel available as his native Kildare. Mayo have almost four times as many clubs, he pointed out, and he admitted that it took him a spell to acclimatise to such harsh realities.

Their defensive naivety will need to be addressed if another rung or two is to be scaled on football’s ladder, but they did at least respond to that Mayo drubbing with a performance that added to the general consensus that they were made look much worse than they are two weeks’ ago.

Rumour has it that they trained four times the week after the provincial final debacle and Carew pointed to a debate on national radio last week as another reason for them to do all they could to make up for that provincial decider debacle.

“I would have been very disappointed with Newstalk and the way they disregarded Sligo in their chat last Thursday,” he said at one point. “I like the show (but) they disrespected our boys.

“There’s no problem with Adrian Marren coming and doing interviews, or myself, and then they just said everyone knows Sligo are going to be hammered so we won’t bother. That’s exactly what they said.” More pertinent going forward is the fact that, in Mayo and Tyrone, they have faced two Division One sides who, in their own ways, have shown them how far they still have to travel.

“We really only had one blip in the year. Tyrone, they are seasoned Division One team, a top six team, whether people like it or not. They are used to playing at that pace and in the first 15 or 20 minutes our lads struggled, especially with runners coming off the shoulders.

“You won’t get that in Division Three. They got it against Mayo, but you have to forget about that performance because we didn’t lay a glove on them.”