Smiling Danny Beck delighted for fully committed Leitrim Minors

After a rough couple of months for Leitrim football, the smiles were back on the faces of players and fans in Kilcoyne Park last Friday evening after the Electric Ireland Connacht MFC Shield Final and joint manager Danny Beck was another with a grin from ear to ear, writes John Connolly.

“I'm smiling today anyway,” Danny replied when the Observer asked how he was feeling, particularly after the loss to Roscommon last week, “I'm delighted for them - we've had a long week of it there. Like I said to you last week, there's no bad teams in Connacht at this grade.

“Every team will have a purple patch and with the two-pointers in play, no lead is ever a good lead nowadays. So, look, I'm happy with the lads. Again, they all emptied it. We asked them to play with pride again today. We said last week that we'd put a bit of pressure on them to put smiles on people's faces in Leitrim and they did it there today.

“There's 35 on the panel and those lads all got to smile today - one of them stayed away from a holiday just to be part of the panel today, he wasn't even in the 24 so, that's how committed these lads are to the cause and they got their reward today.”

With the management not expecting that the final round robin game would double up as the B Final, Danny was just delighted that Leitrim got a positive result: “We were preparing for a group game at one stage and then just, I suppose, it got announced to us that we were playing in the Shield final.  Look, we got here, we got the result that we wanted as well.”

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Initially, it didn’t seem as if Leitrim would make use of the wind before they kicked into high gear: “The first eight minutes we were scratching our heads, wondering when we were going to get our scores and then we clicked and we played some of the best football, in patches, that we played all year.

“Conditions were the same for both teams but they weren't favourable for anyone. But I thought we played really well and took goals at the right times and we got ahead of ourselves. We knew that Sligo were going to get a proper patch and we just had to be able to contain them as much as we could while keeping them far away as well.”

Leitrim now face into the Tier 2 All-Ireland series and Danny is relishing the challenge: “You're going into quality opposition again, there's a round of club games next week. We're going to look at getting a couple of challenges, give the lads that haven't been getting game time that game time that they need to get up to speed as well. There's lots of things to work on.”