McEntee has nothing but pride in his players

“Disappointment? I don’t know. I’m finding it hard to process an emotion and I don’t know if it’s disappointment.” 

The ability of Tony McEntee to retain total clarity in the immediate aftermath of matches never ceases to amaze. The Sligo manager had just watched his team take hot favourites – and last year’s finalists – Down to the absolute brink in Sunday’s Tailteann Cup final, and the easy thing would have been to agree with the reporter’s assertion “that he must be bitterly disappointed”.

“I don’t know how you could be so disappointed whenever you’ve given all you can – and I think we did that. I think we gave all we could give out there. We put on a display that we wanted to do and while not everybody might have been nine or ten out of ten, I think we did extremely well,” said McEntee.

“I’m so delighted with them because we fought for the competition, we fought for the game [to be played] on Sunday, we got it on Sunday and performed. And I don’t know if we can ask much more than that.” 

The game had finished 2-12 to 0-18 at the end of normal time, after Down kicked a 76th minute equaliser against a Sligo side that had been reduced to 14 players following the straight red card shown to Nathan Mullen on the hour mark. Playing over 30 minutes, extra-time included, while a player down in what were very warm and sunny conditions at GAA headquarters, eventually took its toll on a Sligo team that nevertheless refused to die.

Prior to this year Tony McEntee would have been entitled to field 15 players for extra-time but the last Congress voted to treat extra-time as the same game, therefore denying Sligo to replace Mullen at full-time. Is that new rule unfair, McEntee was asked.

“You’re asking me after being on the bad end of that rule. I’d say if we had the old rule and we got back to 15 we’d have been okay, so were we punished properly for a sending off offence? Maybe yes, I don’t know.

“The sending off probably did turn the game but there were opportunities after that where we could probably have held out and maybe stopped them getting the last score. Down did well to get the last score, it was a nice point from McEvoy, but listen, games swing on many things and there hasn’t been that many mistakes throughout the game. People will probably look at the sending off but we had our opportunities and had our chances after that and could probably have held out.

“Once it came to extra-time though, that was when fourteen men made a difference. We did really well to hold out for as long as we did but inevitably, it was just a case of we were going to get caught – and we did.” 

That honesty which is always so evident in the Armagh native’s analysis has undoubtedly filtered on through to Sligo’s players. Losing to Down by a dozen points in this year’s league fixture in Newry, they trailed only once in the first-half, for barely two minutes in the early stages, and having fallen behind against just after half-time, regained some control of the contest when Canice Mulligan palmed home their second goal on 56 minutes. But with Mullen’s heavy tackle forcing the stretcher to take Oisin Savage from the field and to hospital, and causing referee Derek O’Mahoney to dismiss the Sligo man, Down outscored the Yeats County 0-5 to 0-1 down the stretch to force extra-time.

“This should be a platform for progression and not a point where we can fall back down,” insisted Tony McEntee afterwards. “We came here [in 2022] hoping to beat Cavan or hoping that we might do well, today we actually came here thinking we had a good chance of winning and actually winning the competition.

“We never died, we fought hard, we kept going throughout the competition, and with a couple of minutes to go, the last couple of decisions, the last couple of scores, that was the game over.”