Clonoe primed for Eglish encounter tonight

CLONOE look like men on a mission in Division Two this year, but manager Kevin Madden recognises that their march towards the league title and promotion could be stopped in its tracks if they don’t bring their A-game against Eglish this Wednesday night.

The O’Rahilly’s haven’t dropped a single point all season and delivered a knock-out performance against league challengers Moy last Friday evening, but Eglish are waiting in the shadows and will assume the top-spot on the head-to-head rule if they edge Wednesday’s encounter.

The flipside is that a Clonoe victory would mean the Division Two title is all but assured, though they can’t afford to get caught up in that sort of chatter ahead of such a massively important contest.

Manager Kevin Madden said, “It was an important win [against Moy] in the sense that it keeps us at the top of the table, it keeps us unbeaten, but we’ve a massive game now against Eglish and our focus turns towards that.

“It’s extremely tight at the top, the Moy had only dropped one point, Eglish have only dropped two.

“If we’d lost against the Moy, we were putting them in the driving seat. We knew we had to win and the players did well, but we’ve so much work to do and Wednesday night is the focus now.”

The O’Rahilly’s trailed by a point at half-time against the Moy after a free-scoring first-half. Their opponents racked up 2-11 in half an hour’s worth of football, an obvious matter of concern, but Clonoe steadied the ship at the back and they produced a dominant second-half display en route to a 4-24 to 2-15 victory.

“We were a point down at half-time and the Moy had been brilliant, but we were too open for my liking. They had a significant wind at their backs in the first-half, and we knew we really had to go for the game in the second-half.

“They’d played some brilliant football, as did we, and it looked like it could be a complete shoot-out, but we regrouped at half-time, talked about making ourselves a wee bit more compact.

“We closed the space off a lot quicker and as the game opened up, thankfully we were pretty ruthless up front.”

Clonoe can call upon a number of players with bagfuls of intercounty experience including Connor McAliskey, who had an excellent game in attack against the Moy. It’s worth noting that they had nine different scorers, though, in a polished all-round team performance.

Madden said: “I think that’s the thing, we talk about ‘we’ and not ‘me’. One forward isn’t going to win you a game or a league or a championship. It’s not just having four or five scoring forwards either, we have backs and midfielders chipping in with scores.”