Eglish primed for promotion push

EGLISH joint-manager Colm Bradley preferred to accentuate the positives of a rather mercurial showing away to Beragh last Friday night.

Bradley, who in his first year at the helm alongside Niall McElroy, watched on as Eglish surged into a virtually insurmountable 17-point lead at the interval, but they were almost rocked back on their heels by a resurgent Beragh after the break, eventually winning out on a scoreline of 2-17 to 2-11.

The former Fermanagh footballer was still delighted with the victory, particularly given they’d dropped two points on their last day out against neighbours Moy, their first defeat of what’s been a fruitful campaign to date.

“We were disappointed with our performance against the Moy, we had a lot of the ball but didn’t really make it count, especially in the first half.

“We wanted to get a wee bit of a reaction [against Beragh] though in fairness the workrate and effort has always been there, and we’re more so focused on getting a consistency in our performances.

“I think we played our best football of the year to date in the first-half, and then we dropped off abit in the second. You can make excuses and say you take your foot off the pedal when you’re so far ahead, but I think it just got away from us, and we started to make mistakes which compounded things.

“We’ll take the positives from the first-half, and as a group we have to look at what happened and the areas where Beragh got the better of us.”

Eglish will be gunning on achieving promotion back to the first flight at the first time of asking. They sit third in the table at its mid-way point and Bradley is relishing the challenge that’s in front of them over the coming weeks before their Intermediate Championship opener against Coalisland.

“There’s still a huge amount of football to be played in the league. We’ve used a lot of players – lads have been away for one reason or another, but we have a real deep squad and that’s a positive, even if we haven’t really had a completely settled team.

“League football in Tyrone comes at you so fast, and you can’t afford to ease up as any team can catch you on any given day.

“There’s seven or eight teams who have real aspirations of going up, so every game is tough no matter who you’re playing.

” You have to be at a certain level every week, but as I say to the players, you want to be involved in good games and you want to be involved in fighting for promotion, so we’re going to keep going as long as we can. We won’t worry about other results, we’re just going to try and look after ourselves.”