With five games played in Division 4 of the league, the Waterford footballers are still without a win, having fallen at the hands of Laois last night in O'Moore Park.
11 points stood between the sides at the full-time whistle with the home team taking the spoils, 2.13 to 1.5.
The Managers Thoughts
While conversations off the field remain ongoing as regards the state of football in the county, the manager Ephie Fitzgerald is focused on matters on the field.
"Well, I was much more pleased with the overall performance, I think," Fitzgerald told WLR Sport. He added, "it was three points in it at half time and you know we focussed at half-time on trying to keep the game tight and then we got caught with a sucker goal straight after half time. They got two points, and then they were nine or ten up and it was game over."
The game may well have been over in Fitzgerald's assessment, but nonetheless, he was pleased to see his captain Dermot Ryan sending two points over the bar late in the tie to claim some consolation scores for their away trip; Ryan kicked four in all at O' Moore Park.
Improvements
It can't be easy to go out each week knowing how long it's been since the team claimed a win. That losing run stretches back to the summer of 2021 when another Cork man was in charge. Regardless of how difficult it might be to raise the spirits of the team for the throw-in, Fitzgerald felt that the players showed green shoots in their cohesiveness against a "very direct" Laois side.
"I can't fault the application of the guys and I think the system we used today suited them better for long periods," said Fitzgerald. "They [Laois] are a very good side, they're very direct and they have a very very good full forward line who are able to win their ball independently. They were a handful for us but I thought Mikey Kiely and Eoin Butler did a very good job."
Fitness
"We probably ran out of legs - and that's been happening to us. In terms of conditioning; our lads aren't as conditioned as a lot of the other teams. In the second half we're tending to fade away a little bit, but we didn't today. You can say a 10 or 11-point defeat, but I think our performance was better than what the scoreline suggested."
Threatening Laois' Defence
The visitors were just a goal down at the halftime break (1.6 - 1.3) with Jason Curry netting the Déise penalty to give Laois something to think about at the interval.
When Waterford took the initiative to run at the host's, they put them in bother; something Fitzgerald was happy to see, "and we had another couple of soft scores that we probably could have taken," he said. Adding, "Brian Lynch missed one or two, and we kicked three or four wides. What I was very pleased with was the application of the lads. Their tackling was very tigerish. You know we're playing against guys who are physically way stronger than us."
Learnings
Once the second half began, Eoin Lowry found the back of the net to widen the margin and subsequently gave the home team the impetus they needed to push on.
"That gave them a cushion then they relaxed a little bit more because I thought they were a little bit frenetic - particularly towards the end of the first half when we turned them over quite a bit."
"There are things we have to tidy up on. Some of our handpassing was very poor and we gave away a lot of ball that resulted in scores for them - those are things that we have to tidy up on."
"What you find at this level, we can train away as a group but when you play these teams, they are that split second faster in terms of their tackling and physicality. We have to raise it for two weeks time, and I think we will. I'm very encouraged by what I saw out there tonight because we asked them to up their performance in terms of their work rate and I think they did that."
What's Next?
"Look, it's a work in progress. We have London in two weeks' time and we're going to really go at that next week and prepare for that. It's on in Lemybrien so we hope to make that as hostile as we can for them, and you know, get a bit of confidence going into the championship."
