While Dunloy are receiving praise for their display yesterday, their negative tactics contributed to their defeat.
The withdrawal of the corner forwards into the middle third was obviously designed to reduce the Ballyhale threat and in the first half it appeared to be working to an extent as there was 2 points in it at half time, which should have been a point due to a very scorable chance down the right which went wide.
However, a lot of ball into one or two forwards was swallowed up by the Ballyhale back line and it was a case of robbing Peter to play Paul. In order to play that game you would need a big hoor of a full forward in the Colin Fennelly mode which Dunloy didn’t have.
One thing I did notice was that Dunloy missed a lot of their picks, possibly due to the heavily sanded pitch and as a result Colin Fennelly picked the Dunloy full back line’s pocket to set up the goal to put Ballyhale into the lead which they never lost. a ball which should have been cleared 20 seconds previously.
Dunloy were certainly not overawed by their illustrious opponents and Ballyhale knew they were in a game. However as mentioned by manfromdelmonte a lot of aimless balls into a one man FF line was never going to yield scores and in the second half several Dunloy poc outs went down the left wing which were closed down by Ballyhale.
Obvious that Ballyhale were aware of the threat posed by the likes of Keelan Molloy and closed off the running game especially in the second half when Ballyhale reinforced their half back line leaving it difficult for the Dunloy runners to attack, a tactic employed by Slaughtneil in the Ulster final a couple of years ago and by Loughgiel in the Antrim semi final a few years prior to that, where Dunloy had no answer on both occasions.
With 10 minutes left I felt that Dunloy needed to change their set up and go man on man because they were never going to get past the Ballyhale half back line. That never happened.
Definitely one that got away. I reckon Mickey McShane in Slaughtneil is chomping at the bit for a crack at Dunloy next season should Dunloy get out of Antrim which isn’t a given depending on what Loughgiel bring to the table.
Plenty of the younger Loughgiel contingent on the Antrim panel this year which looks good for them as part of their rebuild. Cushendall, I’m still not sure about and its about time that Rossa and the Johnnies stepped up to the mark in the SHC, because let’s face it neither of those clubs are going to do much in the football championship
