'We didn’t show our full potential' admits frustrated Gavin

By Gerry Buckley

After his U20 troops had lost to Meath in very trying conditions at Ashbourne Tuesday evening of last week, Westmeath manager Damien Gavin was as puzzled as the cohort of travelling fans were at the below-par performance they had witnessed.

The 1995 Tom Markham Cup recipient was deflated at how the game had panned out.

"It was very disappointing. We have a lot of really good footballers and we just didn’t perform in the first half. I think we missed eight or nine scoring chances in it. Every one of them sucked the life out of us. They created doubts in the head and we needed just one or two scores to settle us," he remarked.

"There were definitely five or six very scoreable chances missed. Our backs did well and we held them well, to just three points, despite them having a few very good forwards. We probably defended too deep in the first half, and we left ourselves with an awful lot to do in the second half. We were probably too anxious and too careful.”

In truth, by the time the young men in maroon and white belatedly got going (they failed to score until the 47th minute), fatal damage had been done to their championship hopes. A frustrated Gavin added: “But we really took the game to them in the last 20 minutes. We had a couple of goal chances again, but didn’t take them. Senan (Baker) from a free and Brían (Cooney) from play almost got in for goals. Regardless of the conditions, 1-3 is not good enough to win a championship game. We were snapping at chances, and every score counts in a game like tonight.”

The losing bainisteoir concluded: “If we were at our best and were beaten, it would feel a lot different now. In a nutshell, we didn’t show our full potential. We were expecting an awful lot more.”