Kildare v Offaly

I'd say the thinking behind bringing Dowling on was to try and curb Peter Cunningham's growing influence. Dowling had the legs to track him and at that stage Conway and Feely were running out of steam with the latter being moved into full forward. O'Neill's hand was forced with some of the other changes. Peter Kelly was in trouble and was on a yellow card, Lyons picked up a knock and Doyle was black carded.

ohluckyme wrote:

tomoneillandhissisteranne wrote:

I had a dream....I mean I really did have a dream last night that Cork drew Longford in Cork and Kildare drew Mayo in Newbridge...let us see.....

Hey Tom, your dream just turned to a nightmare

It sure did

Sorry yeah, division three, sloppy mistake.

But anyway my point is that to read some of the posts you'd think we'd turned the corner - I'm just saying I don't see what's so impressive about beating Offaly by five at home after chucking away another comfortable lead to be level with a few minutes to go. Granted I didn't see it, maybe it was more impressive in the flesh. But I just think a few of our supporters think everything's disastrous when we lose and brilliant when we win. Players were being called gutless cowards after the Westmeath game, now the same lads showed great fight. In reality I wouldn't think our level has changed at all.

People go mad looking for a blanket defence when we concede a cricket score - then when we play one and don't score enough to win, the manager's a fool for trying to impose an alien system on the players.

As for comparing Ryan and O'Neill, I just think it's accepted by most people that Ryan was some kind of idiot and I'm making the point that he achieved some results that were far more impressive than anything we've managed this year.

Even if we take the Cork game out as Shergar suggests (though I'd add that if you're going to take away credit for a win against a team facing a six-day turnaround, you have to give massive credit for us winning away to Offaly after our own six-day turnaround last year), there were still plenty of decent results. We hammered Louth, Down, Laois and Longford and took Monaghan to extra-time. Won ugly against Clare and Offaly. After each of those five wins where we destroyed the opposition we heard the standard line about us not being up against much - but I haven't seen us hammer anyone this summer.

I'm not suggesting we should be thinking of parting company with O'Neill or anything like it. I would give him at least two and possibly three years regardless of results.

I only hope it doesn't come off the rails Saturday night. If Mayo press up on us, it could get ugly. Hopefully they stick to their safety-first way of playing - that way we might get a foothold in the game. But I would fear the worst. Hopefully it's a night when we start to see the potential of our better younger players.

If not, I hope all the posters in this thread are still as reasonable and patient on Sunday as they are this week.

All Kildare did last weekend was realise they were playing a team at their level and just went toe to toe. Simply as that in my eyes. We had a better team than they did and the players just got stuck in. Against Wexford and Westmeath they thought they were playing Dublin and sat back. And the reason why we were so bad was we never got involved in those two games. Mayo will be a bigger test but lets hope we improve further because we will need to.