Game 9

Longford 2-2 Dundalk

So there’s no where else to start really is there? We have a goalkeeping problem.

I feel bad for both players who have been put in positions they never should have been put in. Peter Cherrie is a fine stand-in goalkeeper, he doesn’t regularly make the howlers he made on Monday but he cannot be the solution.

The idea that our starting keeper job is between someone we correctly moved on from years ago and someone who has looked, to put it nicely, shaky, screams of mismanagement and poor planning.

I’ve seen people complain about the team selection and while I was critical of the amount of changes made in the early part of the season, I fully expected changes on Monday after playing on Friday night. And it feels again like we’re in this situation where if you analyze the game and remove two awful goalkeeping mistakes we should have won this.

But the point being is that you can’t remove the mistakes and as much as we would like to paint this a spirited fightback from two goals down, the reality is that mistakes like those are crippling any momentum that the team is trying to build.

There were other awful mistakes in the game that shouldn’t be forgotten either and one of those awful mistakes from Andy Boyle in the 2nd half should have lead to Longford going 3-1 up but for a good save from Cherrie.

It says a lot about the team at the moment that they look most dangerous from corner kicks. There is a severe lack of creativity in this team when playing against a team that is happy just to sit back and defend a lead which has happened far too often this season. Giving away the first goal in the game, a lot of times due to terrible mistakes, is a trend that absolutely has to stop.

It will be the new managers job to make sure those mistakes don’t derail a season which is hanging on to the rails by a very thin thread.