Downbeat Laverty rues familiar failings

Conor Laverty acknowledged that Down keep ‘falling down’. Pic: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho

Conor Laverty acknowledged that Down keep “falling down” in the same areas after their latest crushing Croke Park defeat.

For the third time in four years, Down arrived at GAA HQ for a national final as favourites and left empty-handed.

Saturday’s Tailteann Cup final loss was easily the worst of the lot, perhaps as bad as any of the long list of final defeats they’ve encountered, in the Ulster championship, National League, and All-Ireland series, since last winning the Sam Maguire Cup in 1994.

Reminded that it was still a relatively positive year for Down, who won the Division 3 title — albeit requiring extra time to beat Wexford — and beat Donegal in Ulster, boss Laverty didn’t take much encouragement.

“Yeah, but it’s still the same areas that we’re falling down on,” he said. “So that’s... for all the bits of positives, and getting promotion, there’s still areas that are frequently being revisited in periods of games. And we’ve tried to work on them.

“On the training pitch, we’ve tried to work on them. On and off the pitch, we’ve tried. But it’s a massive challenge.”

It was a mere 35 minutes that cost Down. They maybe thought they’d already sealed victory when they led by 2-10 to 0-4 at half time. At that stage, they were nine from nine on their own kick-outs and had restricted Wicklow to just two points from open play.

Then the wheels came off.

“The stats don’t lie there,” said Laverty, referencing the amount of times Down fought hard to win their own ball, and then wasted it.

“But our execution after that...like, we were over our target on our numbers of what we wanted to achieve on our own kick-out.

“We’d said we didn’t want to go into contact [because] we knew Barry Tiernan has a trend of being hard on steps. We knew that coming into the game, we’d spoken about that and ah, look, I thought it was maybe moments, and in those moments we just lacked that bit of composure in the final third, just to get the scoreboard ticking over and to just keep that distance whenever they were coming at us.

“And they were always going to come because they’d done the same against Offaly and with the new rules and the breeze, but take nothing away from Wicklow, the heart and courage they have played with over this season has been huge.”

Laverty has completed four seasons in the Down hotseat. It’s been filled with huge highs and crushing lows. It remains to be seen if the Kilcoo man, a father of six, goes again. The same for some of his older players.

“Today isn’t the day to be looking ahead for anything else,” he said. “We’ve invested a lot of time together and whenever you’re investing so much time, you need now to take a bit of time and just settle the heads and study a lot of things. Ultimately it will be the players, the players and the county board, they’ll decide what the next step is then for this team.”