Kenny Shiels insists Derry City's season will not fizzle out
By Gary Ferry
Kenny Shiels has insisted that Derry City’s season will not fizzle out, despite his team falling to another lacklustre defeat, this time at Galway.
The City boss accepted that his team were second best at Eamon Deacy Park on Friday night, but pointed to extenuating circumstances for his side’s eighth league defeat of the season.
He said: “We knew that we were massively understrength which isn’t an excuse by the way. Not only were we understrength but we were under conditioned and I felt deep inside that not being conditioned and having not played football for a month, and having the spine of a team missing, that it would hit us very hard. It could have been prevented because we spoke all week about playing against direct play and playing against second phase set-pieces, and they score a long throw in and a corner.”
Shiels did admit that Galway’s determination to get the three points was also a significant factor.
“They had more heart than us,” he agreed. “They are fighting for their lives. They just out the ball in the other half of the pitch and they had runners trying to influence those balls. That’s the way they played and we knew that. I’m not going to criticise that, it’s just alien to what we do, but it got them the result, with two set plays and two goals, but we need to do better.”
City have now fallen to three successive defeats since beating Shamrock Rovers at Tallaght, and with little else to play for other than third place, there is a danger that the players could struggle to rouse themselves for the remaining games. Not the case, according to Shiels.
“It’s not going to fizzle out because we are in a position where we are six points clear of Bohemians and we’re four ahead of Bray, who we play next week; if we win that we could stretch that to seven,” he explained. “We will be conditioned next week and hopefully we might have a few players back, but certainly the boys need to give a bit more as well.
“I’ll give you a few things which are disheartening. What’s disheartening is coming into train and not having a game at the end of the week, and then you have to do it again at the end of the following week. It saps the mental strength and it saps the high positive energy from players and you can see that. I wouldn’t say the boys lacked hart, but with all the circumstances, you’d have to say it was hard for us tonight, and Galway had the heart to see it home in a relegation dogfight. They needed to get a result and they got it.”
Shiels admitted that some players will have to raise their games going forward but also stressed that regular football will once again bring the best from his team.
“You can’t turn the clock back,” he said. “I would never blame the players for not having the heart. What I’m saying is that they have more heart than us, because when you are fighting to stay up, it is a much greater motivational tool than team who have been redundant for a month. I have worked in football for a long time and I have never had an experience where you have had to take a month out of the season, while most of the other teams were playing.”