‘I’d like to think it’s going to be a different Monaghan in five weeks’ time’

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Colm Shalvey

Monaghan senior football manager Gabriel Bannigan felt his team’s defeat at home to Galway on Sunday was mostly due to their “lethargic first-half performance”, which left them trailing by four points after playing with the breeze.

Bannigan admitted: “Our first-half performance was terrible. I don’t know why we were so flat. There was a lack of energy, a lack of work-rate and poor decisions. It really did not reflect what happened on the training pitch, it was probably our best two weeks of training over the year.

“We had Davy Garland, Jack McCarron, Louis Kelly and Stevie O’Hanlon back in, so it’s very hard to explain where that lethargic first-half performance came from. The second half was a hell of a lot better, we had a real fighting spirit, but we lost both halves by four points.

"To lose the second half by four playing against that strong breeze was actually a good performance. The decision against Ryan O’Toole looked harsh to me and Galway got a two-pointer off that and Galway breached, which wasn’t spotted, and they got a two-pointer off that as well.

“It seems that a lot of things are going against us at the moment, but we’ll take the positives from the second half. We have five weeks to get ready for Cavan and it’s all about Cavan now. We had 25 turnovers and we left too many scores behind us. Our efficiency level is just not at the standard we need.

“There’s serious room for improvement; we have a lot to work on. These boys need to be hurting after the league campaign to date and I’d like to think it’s going to be a different Monaghan in five weeks’ time.”

Having welcomed a couple of players back from injury last weekend, Bannigan hopes to have a bigger panel to pick from as the championship looms into the horizon.

“Dylan Byrne is close, then there’s Ryan McAnespie, Bobby McCaul and Killian Lavelle. We’re hoping all of them will be back out in the next few weeks.

It’s getting tight to the Cavan game, but we’d like to have them as options anyway. We lost a couple of men this week as well: Thomas Hughes got injured and Ryan Mohan went down with flu. Those things should clear up quickly enough.

“There’s a few key men like Conor McCarthy that we’re still missing. Louis Kelly was only going to play for a half, that was the medical advice, so we were always going to do that. We have handed out 16 debuts in the league. Most of that was by necessity and some of it by design in that we wanted to blood some new players anyway.

The new players have benefited from the experience they’ve had and some of them have performed very well.”