Gillespie keen for his players to relish Greystones ‘challenge’

AFTER watching his side ease to a 33-7 victory over Galwegians at Stevenson Park on Saturday, new Dungannon coach, Johnny Gillespie wants his side to ‘enjoy’ a different ‘challenge’ when they travel to take on Greystones this coming weekend.

While delighted with most of what he saw during their opening All-Ireland League 2B match of the season when they earned a bonus point win over Galwegians, Gillespie admits there is still plenty of room for improvement and that their first away match will be a different kind of match.

“The challenge is now how we back that up away from home and that’s going to be a different challenge,” he explained.

“[Saturday against Galwegians] was a good test for us and it shows how seriously we’ll be taking the league.

“But for us it will be about how we respond to today’s win and how do we respond against good opposition but to be honest, we just want to play good rugby and enjoy our football at the same time.”

The win over Galwegians was the result Gillespie, his coaching staff and his players had their eyes on over the last two weeks, which is why they weren’t overly concerned about the 45-17 reverse at home to Instonians in the Ulster Premiership a week earlier.

“We thought the Instonians result in isolation looked a little bit worse than it was but by putting some context to it, we rested some guys, but we acknowledge at the same time they are a very good rugby team and we weren’t just clinical enough,” Gillespie explained.

“But the eye was most definitely on today [Saturday] and yes we’ll learn because there was 25 minutes of the game that was rubbish but we’ll learn from that and we’ll go again.”

During the 55 minutes when his team clicked, they left Galwegians in their wake as tries from James McMahon, Ben McCaughey, who kicked four conversions, James Gamble and an Andrew McGregor brace secured the five points and left Gillespie admitting that his debut match in charge in the All-Ireland Leagues had surpassed his own hopes.

“It was maybe a little bit above what we had expected or what we hoped for,” he said. “They were physical and well-organised but we played well in the first half.

‘To be honest, everything we worked on during the week, all of pre-season, was starting to come together and that was probably the most satisfying part of it. It was just a satisfying day and a pleasing performance.”

Dungannon raced out of the blocks against their visitors with McMahon and McCaughey dotting down for a 12-0 lead before Galwegians got going with Darragh Kennedy capitalising on some good work from his pack to cross the home line before converting himself to make it 12-7 with 10 minutes of the first half remaining.

That was about as good as it got for the visitors, however, as two quick tries from Gamble and McGregor, both converted by McGaughey, made it 26-7 and the latter completed the scoring late on with another effort converted by McGaughey to conclude a good day at the office for Dungannon.