Nevin O'Donnell sounds clarion calls as he says Leitrim are not gone yet

You only had to look at the ashen faces of Leitrim’s players as they trooped off the field last Sunday to know how much defeat to Longford hurt but hope is not gone says keeper Nevin O’Donnell who stressed that promotion still lies within reach for the Green & Gold.

The 1-16 to 0-13 defeat in Glennon Brothers Pearse Park is certainly a blow but Nevin is adamant that Leitrim’s hopes are not over: “It is tough today but we’re not gone yet. There is still an opportunity there and Andy just addressed that straight away. As raw and as sore as it is right now, we have to dust it down, get our recovery in.

“We’ll be back Monday night,see what we have to work on because we’re still in with a shout. We’ve a really, really good group of lads - it is disappointing now not coming out on the right side of these results but we are working really hard and hopefully that hard work has to come good at some stage. It is all we can do, go hard again against Laois and we’re still in with a shout.”

Pinpointing what went wrong will take some figuring out: “We’re going to have to really go back and analyse it tomorrow night, we’ll be looking at it when it is sent out but it is really disappointing. We came here really wanting a performance to be honest, we really did want to start well, we didn’t and we didn’t do justice to it.”

Losing Ryan O’Rourke to a black card and Jack Gilheaney didn’t help: “When you go a man down, in such a tight division, it is so hard to keep momentum in games. It is a credit to the lads, for the last 15 minutes of the first half, we put in a huge shift, got ourselves back into the game but it is hard when you are working really hard during the week on stuff like that, implementing it and we put ourselves in a  position to get ourselves back into it and the same happened in the second half.”

REACTION: LEITRIM LEFT THEMSELVES TOO MUCH TO DO AGAINST LONGFORD

Nevin had a small injury scare on the stroke of halftime and was glad to be able to play in the second half but stressed he has full faith in his back-up Killian Gaffey: “I gave myself a scare! The worst thing you can do when you’re coming to the end of your career - I looked to my left, looked to my right, I can’t do that again. 

“I gave it a bit of a roll, it was a bit sore at the time but the medical team had a good look at it at halftime so it was ok. We have a good young lad there from Carrick if I went down, a great young lad in young Gaffey that would have been well fit to step in there. There are plenty of boys able to step in and do a job.”