Tracton 4-5, Shamrocks 1-5
Tracton beat Shamrocks by 3 clear goals in Shanbally in the Junior B Football League on Tuesday night last, in what was Shamrocks first game back in this grade in 2 years.
Shamrocks played with the strong breeze in the first half in the hope of building up a sufficient lead to withstand the Tracton bombardment in the second half. And in reality the 1-4 to 1-2 lead at half time was nowhere near enough.
Shamrocks started brightly enough and captain for the night Steven Downey whipped over a neat point after 2 minutes, quickly followed by another from Brian Cusack before Tracton responded at the other end. Things became a bit more even around the middle as Tracton came more into the game. However, Shamrocks scored a goal through Jamie O’Driscoll who pounced on a lose ball to drive home. Shamrocks now moved into a 1-3 to 0-1 lead. However, the next 3 minutes proved to be the turning point with a 7 point swing in Tractons favour.
First Shamrocks should have scored an easy 1-1 at one end within the space of a minute with 2 guilt edged chances going abegging. Tracton won the kickout and broke up the field and scored what can only described as a very soft goal from a goalmouth scramble and they were back in it. Brian Cusack scored his second point to leave the half time score as above, 1-4 to 1-2.
Shamrocks knew they faced a big ask and unfortunately 2 goals in the space of a minute knocked the stuffing out of the challenge, the first one after half time even worse than the one in the first half. These goals decided the game and eventhough Shamrocks tried hard to the end, the damage was done from the first half and immediatlely after the break. Darragh Collins did manage to get a late point for Shamrocks.
Training later in the week for ALL players; next league game is away to Carrigaline next Tuesday (April 17th) at 8pm.
Team: J. Wilson, A. Hickey, P. Prout, D. Roche, S. O’Reilly, S. Hurley, R. Murphy, S. Jordan, J. Brady, C. Ronayne, M. O’Neill, B. Cusack, S. Downey, D. O’Neill, J. O’Driscoll. Subs used – D. Collins, S. Collins, K. O’Mahony, C. O’Sullivan, P. Andrews.