Leitrim didn't use the two extra men well says Olcan Conway

Anyone that knows Olcan Conway knows he doesn’t make excuses and the Leitrim hurling manager didn’t break that habit last Saturday after a demoralising defeat at the hands of Fermanagh in the Lory Meagher Cup.

With a two man advantage for the final 20 minutes of Saturday's 0-19 to 1-9 defeat in Avant Money Pairc Sean Mac Diarmada, Leitrim failed to trouble the visitors and Olcan acknowledged that after the game: “We didn’t use the two men well and there is no point in saying otherwise, they were moving around the pitch, they were finding spaces. 

“Our men were probably stepping off that bit, not pushing up as high as they should have on different occasions to try and stop them around that middle sector a lot of the time.”

For all that, the challenges the county hurlers face are huge with injuries and an inability to find pitches for training clearly hampering their efforts: “We’ll take a lot of lessons from today - Fermanagh are basically playing 12 months of the year all year round and we’re still playing catch-up massively this year. 

“We’ve no pitches to train on, it makes it very difficult - we had no pitch session this week, nowhere to train and we ended up doing a bit of astro work. We had a few things we wanted to work on, puc outs and possession and where we are going to play. It has just been very difficult. I can’t fault the lads for that because in fairness, we didn’t get a lot of chances to practice that stuff this year. 

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“I think in the last six to eight weeks, we’ve only had six pitch sessions altogether, the rest of us end up in a gym or a small astroturf which is very difficult when you’re trying to prepare a team for the championship. It is nobody’s fault, don’t get me wrong, everybody is struggling with pitches at the moment but we just seem to be playing catch up on a lot of teams at the moment.”

As for injured players, Olcan again made no excuses: “We were missing a few, Evan Cox, Feeney is another one, a couple of other lads, Sean Riordan, Philip Burgess didn’t make the squad today due to injuries but you can’t. 

“We have good lads on the bench and lads who came in and worked extremely hard today so you have a squad, you try to build a squad for days like today and you hope you have enough.

“But Fermanagh, hats off to them, they dug in, they grinded it out. They bought frees, slowed the game down, won frees, did everything to hold onto their lead from the first half and we just didn’t have enough to try and get back at them.”

An inability to capitalise on the wind and a failure to score against the wind in the first half proved costly: “It was a very, very strong wind in the first half but we probably should have tagged on two or three scores, that’s probably a disappointing fact of the first half. We did create a few opportunities, not a lot, but we did feel it was an eight to ten point wind in the first half, that if we kept it tight that we’d have a great opportunity in the second half. Unfortunately we just didn’t kick on.

“Not getting them chances in the first half, missed a lot in the second half as well and Fermanagh are a very seasoned outfit, they all play together at club level, they worked the ball extremely well into spaces even though they were down to 13 men at the finish. They were cute in what they did, cute in how they moved the ball and we just didn’t take enough opportunities.”