As the snow begins to fall once more at the home of Rathcline GAA Club, Mark Dowd isn’t heading towards the presentation area where the Hastings Cup will be given residency in Roscommon for another 12 months. Instead he’s overseeing his substitutes being put through their paces by selector Iain Daly. He encourages and cajoles them in the knowledge that they’ll have a big part to play in what will be a tough Connacht championship campaign.
By Ian Cooney
All is rosy in the garden for now. Another successful Hastings Cup campaign has been a useful exercise in ascertaining the strength-in-depth of his panel. His players are learning quickly too. Seven days earlier, his team were fortunate that 14 wides didn’t come back to haunt them against Mayo. On Saturday, Roscommon kicked just four wides and posted 2-21, 2-18 of which came from play.
“It is something we’ve probably worked on this week. We created the chances last week and didn’t get our scores. This week, we did get the scores, so I’m happy with that. We’ve been stressing in games that if we’re five points ahead or behind that we’d stick to our gameplan to the very end,” he explained.
But there’s always room for improvement and the concession of another soft goal didn’t please the Strokestown native.
“It (the Galway goal) was something similar to what happened last week. The ball came in and probably someone didn’t call it on time. One player hesitated and one player didn’t go for it. It’s something we need to work on.
“If teams are looking at us, they might see that as an opportunity where they might get an advantage. While we played well today, when we look back at the DVD, we’ll see loads of things that we’ll need to improve on,” he pointed out.
Missing Enda Smith, Thomas Corcoran and Diarmuid Murtagh, Roscommon still obliterated Galway and Dowd has been thrilled with his players’ application since he became manager.
“We have a big enough panel there. All the lads are training hard. In fairness to the lads sitting on the bench, they deserve game time. We found it very hard to pick this team today, so we are conscious that there are lads coming on that can do just as good a job as the guy coming off,” he continued.
Inevitably, there will be hype surrounding his team in the coming months but Dowd vowed that he won’t be listening to it.
“I can’t stop people talking. People can say whatever they want but we’re a grounded team. We know what we want. The only focus for us at the moment is March 18th against Sligo. We’ll take it one step at a time from there,” he concluded
