Fermanagh V St Mary’s
All games in this competitive division will be hard fought but Fermanagh come into the campaign with perhaps one of their toughest assignments, an away trip to Aughrim to face a Wicklow side who scored a solid win over the Erne side in their most recent meeting, last Spring’s Division Four league final at Croke Park.
The two promoted teams from last season will be all too aware that scraping up the points which would ensure survival come the end of the seven match programme will be an exceptionally difficult job so both presumably will have earmarked this clash as one of the stronger opportunities to collect a result.
Fermanagh have had a decent enough preparation for the league with a four match programme in the Dr McKenna Cup, the final two games against strong county opposition in the form of Monaghan and Tyrone.
Two defeats there but despite that there are grounds for optimism that a sturdy league campaign can be fashioned out.
The McKenna Cup was used to a great extent to have a look at promising new talent and also to give some of the more seasoned players who had been out of the frame for a lengthy spell some crucial game time.
In the latter category come Marty O’Brien, Tommy McElroy and Martin McGrath and to a lesser degree Barry Owens.
At the moment the squad is not quite at full strength. Daniel Kille, Conor Quigley, Ronan Gallagher and Barry Mulrone are still unavailable, this quartet facing varying lengths of recuperation.
But there is a solid squad ready for selection, a squad which has lots of experience with an injection of the essential fresh blood.
Defensively there is no shortage of players to select from which is of course a happy position to be in as far as management is concerned.
Few would be assured of first choice selection but presumably team captain Ryan McCluskey will operate in the full back line, Brian Cox has done enough to ensure a centre back slot and Barry Owens, if available will also feature.
The supporting cast has a clutch of players all of whom have shown their merit, John Woods, Declan McCusker, Damian Kelly and Marty O’Brien among the leading crew here.
In the middle of the park the youthful Ryan Jones has established a presence with James Sherry likely to be his partner but also in the frame here are Martin McGrath and Shane Lyons.
So far so good.
For goalkeeper, defence and midfield we look well enough equipped.
The problems begin up front.
In the opening two games the attack flourished and delivered a barrowload of scores.
But in the remaining two games against better marshalled and organised county opposition it has been a different story.
A sparse handful of points in the games with Monaghan and Tyrone and even more worryingly the greater bulk of those scores came from placed kicks. Scores from open play were few and far between.
Not that this is entirely the fault of the forwards.
One of the difficulties faced is the absence of a really formidable physical presence.
We haven’t got one so alternative strategies will have to undertaken to address the situation to make use of the qualities that we do possess.
And those qualities include fleetfooted players, nimble in movement.
We have to find a way to get beyond the defensive barricade that is going to be constantly thrown up by the way the game is currently being played.
Bringing the ball into scrums of opponents who have filtered back to station themselves just inside their own half just isn’t going to produce dividends.
For far too often we just cough up possession and are then vulnerable to the swift counter attack.
Quicker movement of the ball but critically more accurate distribution of the foot pass over a medium distance is critical to hurdling the mass of opponents stacked up just inside their own territory.
Lessons will have been learned from the experiences of the games against Monaghan and Tyrone. No shortage of players capable of producing scores, Paul Ward and Daryl Keenan in the full forward line, Shane McCabe engineering at centre half forward, Tomás Corrigan, Kane Connor also sharp and threatening.
All in all a good panel to work with and much to look ahead to.