Dungannon leave it late against Corinthians

DUNGANNON’S first XV had to be patient and they were forced to dig-deep in order to gain their second win in as many game following their promotion to Energia All-Ireland League 2A against Galway Corinthians on Saturday.

Having won on the road at Greystones a week earlier, the Stevenson Park men were keen to achieve a similar feat on their first home league appearance of the season and while that looked unlikely as the clock ticked down, the on-pitch belief never wavered and their performance was rewarded one minute from time when Ben McCaughey, who had kicked a penalty four minutes earlier, converted James Gamble’s try to seal the narrowest of wins, 18-17.

“On the scoreboard we left it late, but on reflection, we’d have been disappointed if we’d not won it,” Dungannon head coach, Jonny Gillespie, observed.

“I thought we, probably were, on balance, slightly better, and just contrived to make a few bad decisions at key times and a few silly mistakes.

“That’s fine because we’re getting used to being up a league and the margins are a wee bit smaller and the punishments of not being right are harsher – it’s as much a mental thing as anything – so we just need to compute everything a wee bit quicker than last year.”

Dungannon started the match brightly with Adam Milligan scoring an unconverted effort just seven minutes in but Corinthians responded well with Jack Conway converting Iain Staunton’s touchdown before he knocked over a 33rd minute penalty as the visitors led 5-10 at the break.

McCaughey narrowed the gap after the interval but the visitors again reacted positively to that set-back as Conway converted a Darragh Fitzpatrick score to leave them comfortably in the lead at 8-17.

But, having produced a performance that warranted more than it had earned up to that stage, Dungannon weren’t defeated and they mounted pressure on the Corinthians defence during the last 10 minutes and they gained their reward during the closing five minutes with McCaughey’s two kicks and Gamble’s touchdown to win by one in the end and make it a perfect start to the new season.

And while delighted with their start to the campaign, Gillespie isn’t getting over excited, realising that tougher tasks lie ahead, including this coming Saturday when they travel to Dublin to take on Wanderers.

“You never know how it’s going to go in a new league,” he acknowledged. “But having seen what we’ve produced in the first two weeks, we’d be content. The first goal is to win enough games to keep us in the division and to not look too far ahead.

“There will be teams like Barnhall who look very physically dominant, so there are going to be days when we’re underdogs and chasing the game a little bit but it’s just nice to get points on the board early and give us a bit of confidence.

“We’re down the road to Wanderers, so that means the teams we know the best are the teams we face in our first three fixtures, which is not a bad thing.

“We look forward to that battle but we’ll see how everyone wakes up [on Sunday] because there are a few boys [suffered knocks] so we’ll have to plan for that, but Wanderers will be a big challenge for us and we’re out to pick up as many points as we can and see if we can improve upon any of those silly errors we weren’t happy with [against Corinthians] and if that brings a positive result, then that’s a bonus.”