Sloppy Clogher pay the price against Malone

CLOGHER Valley produced an uncharacteristically sloppy performance against Malone in their final regular season fixture on Saturday.

In the end, a Karl Bothwell try converted by David Maxwell, who also knocked over a penalty, was all they had to show for their efforts as they went down 10-17 to their Belfast visitors.

The result mattered little on the day as Stephen Bothwell’s men had already been assured of third place and a promotion semi-final clash at Dungannon on April 19 following the previous week’s win over Galwegians, who sneaked into the final play-off berth on Saturday, but the Clogher head coach is adamant things need to improve over the next week or two.

“We didn’t play at all, made too many mistakes, didn’t keep the ball, everything we talk about that we shouldn’t do we did, leaving it very difficult for ourselves,” he observed.

“I’m hoping [the performance was a result of the fixture being effectively meaningless] because I shouldn’t have to lose my head for the boys to click into gear because all I do is I get frustrated with myself and then that leaks onto them but there were so many poor things done today, you couldn’t watch it.”

After seeing his team capitulate against Malone, Bothwell believes a less is more approach may be used ahead of the massive clash at Dungannon in two weeks time.

“It happens and it’s frustrating to watch when they don’t do umpteen things we’ve been trying at training but as I said after the game, we have an unbelievable team that wants to win and you know they’re frustrated too.

“And I think maybe that’s a wee bit of it too, if it doesn’t work for one boy, then another takes over and tries individually too hard and that doesn’t work too. We have to work as a team rather than one man trying to take on a pack.

“There is a lot of frustration but we have to find our form [for April 19th] because at this stage of the season, you’d think that things should be starting to click but that wasn’t the case today [Saturday].

“At training, we’ve been trying to add a couple of things in, so maybe we’ll take them out again and get back to basics and maybe have a real game plan and go with it and if it works, it works but at least do it right.”

Prior to their trip to Dungannon, Clogher face something of a fixture headache tomorrow (Saturday) when Ballymena come to The Cran for the Ulster Senior Shield final at 2.30pm when Bothwell will have to decide how many of his starting XV will play.