Poacher stuck for words after ‘head-scratching’ and ‘abysmal’ Carlow defeat

Sometimes there are just no words - at least that is what manager Steven Poacher felt after Leitrim’s 23 point destruction at the hands of Carlow in the final Allianz NFL Division 4 clash of 2026 on Sunday, even if he defiantly promised that his Green & Gold troops will bounce back against Sligo in the championship.

One of the hardest jobs any inter-county manager ever has to do is face the media in the aftermath of a heavy defeat and it certainly wasn’t easy for Steven Poacher after the 4-22 to 2-5 loss in Netwatch Cullen Park last Sunday, a fact he acknowledged with his very first comments after the game.

“There's no words. I think Longford are promoted actually, I've just heard, but it's absolutely incredible,” said a baffled and deeply disappointed Leitrim manager before asking “How we can go from that performance last week against Longford to that performance today? I'll tell you boys, I am a wee bit stuck for words today because it is head-scratching.”

Never once to mince his words nor hide behind cliches or platitudes, Poacher bemoaned Leitrim’s lack of consistency: “You can talk about a young group and things like that but we had a good chat inside there in the sanctuary of our changing room there and we've got to ask ourselves the question, ‘how can we produce such good performances and then such abysmal performances’?

“Consistency is probably one of the hardest things that you can teach in any sport, but consistency is doing the simple things well over and over again and in that first half we just simply didn't do enough of them. I thought the first 15 minutes were magnificent. I was just thinking, yeah, we'll kick on here, we'll push on. 

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“I think we went 2-3 to 1-2 up and we were playing some really good football. We had a real handle on Ben McCarron's kick-outs, they couldn't get a glove on us and then we just started making individual mistakes, simple errors, missing, we got blocked down five times in the first half. 

Absolutely horrendous stuff, stuff that we haven't been doing in a long time and look, it goes back to that day when I spoke to you in Tipperary - it's worse than that. There's only one way now to go and that's lift again from Markievicz Park and that's it. The league is done now. It's been disappointing.”

Poacher’s previous connections as a coach with Carlow under Turlough O’Brien added to the trauma of the game: “For me, I don't think I've ever felt as low - I know a lot of people here in this ground, I've created a lot of really good memories with really good people in this place. 

“I met a few of them coming off the field and I probably feel a bit ignorant in that I wasn't really speaking much to them. But a lot of really good people. Even big Seán O'Brien, I met Seán there. He's 82 years of age, he's a kit man here, a lovely, lovely fella. A gent I never even got to speak to because I'm just distraught. I'm just confused, distraught and baffled.”

Probably most baffling to the Leitrim manager was the failure to follow on the superb victory over Longford, a problem that has bedevilled Leitrim in this League campaign: “Do I want to be where Longford and Carlow are? Absolutely. Could we possibly be there? Absolutely. We showed last week how good a side we are but we can't continue with the inconsistency. 

“We can't because if we continue with that, it's just going to drive us all insane. There was a big push this week on backing up our performance last week. I don't think there was any complacency, there was nobody this week thinking, oh sure, we can't go up, we need to win by ten.

Steven Poacher leaves the pitch at Netwatch Cullen Park last Sunday Picture: Willie Donnellan

The message was very, very straightforward - let's bring a bit of consistency where we can back up our performance because we haven't backed up our performance. It's been peaks and troughs all year. Really good performance in Wicklow, poor performance against Waterford. Inconsistent performance against London.

“Bad first half against Antrim, shocking performance against Tipp. Brilliant performance against Longford. Peaks and troughs. As I said last week, lads, the ceiling for this team is huge. But the floor is low.”

The Leitrim manager actually felt that his team could get after Carlow, given the pressure the home team was under, but the Green & Gold’s failure to compete at midfield caused huge problems: “There's a lot of players on that Carlow team, they're flashy players and when things are going well, they're really going well. When things are going bad, they're really going bad.

“They showed in the last two games that they're vulnerable as well. And I felt if we could get a run on them and get in front of them, I thought that we could cause them serious bother and we were doing that. Obviously the kick-outs are a major part of the game now, a major part of the modern game. 

“If you're not winning on your own and you're not breaking even in the oppositions, then you're in big trouble. And that's what ultimately started. We started to go short on kick-outs. We started to give silly balls away and that ultimately cost us in that first half.

“All we actually needed in that first half was a score or two to break that monopoly of scores that Carlow got. Am I right in saying that Carlow scored 10 without a replay?  You can't do that lads. I think we should have had at least three goals in the first half. I think Fergal went through at one stage, it was a 3v1. 

“It was a major opportunity for a goal and we didn't take it and that, unfortunately, is the lie of the land. With a young group, it's one step forward, two steps back. And today it feels like three steps back unfortunately.”

And the Leitrim boss returned to a theme he has been preaching consistently since he took on the role, that improving Leitrim’s physicality will take time: “That is a Carlow group that's been together for five or six years as well. They've got themselves in good physical order as well. 

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“Some of their forwards are very strong physically. We had 21 new players last year with 16 new players again this year and it's not as if we just retained everyone from last year. So it's just trying to keep them together, trying to get them at a level of S&C consistency, a level of looking after themselves, their recovery, their rest, their nutrition, the whole lot of that. It's the whole package, boys.

“If you want to be a county player, it doesn't happen overnight. It takes a couple of years. It takes players years to actually get to the level of inter-county football, it really does.”

A post mortem will take place during the week but Poacher reiterates that the Green & Gold will bounce back when they travel to Markievicz Park to take on Sligo in the Connacht Championship on Sunday April 12: “We'll look at the video during the week, we'll see what we've done wrong. What could we have done better there? And we'll earn and we'll grow. And listen, please God, if there's a pattern in this team, it's that after one bad performance, there's normally a good performance. 

“So please God, we'll have that in Markievicz Park. We'll be bouncing in Markievicz Park, there's no doubt about that. There's only one way from here and that's up because today is as low as it probably gets.”