Eunan’s need to be matching rivals at underage – Devine

BY RYAN FERRY

ST Eunan’s Under 21 manager Peter Devine acknowledges that some of their rivals are coming strong at underage level, and says it’s important that his club still keep churning out young talent.

The Letterkenny club have a host of players in the 22-25 age bracket which is encouraging.

However below that, there doesn’t appear to be the same quality coming through, and they haven’t had any huge success at Minor or Under 21 level in recent seasons.

Fintan Doherty, Noah Barrett and Luke McGuinness all played senior championship this year but weren’t regulars.

However, they all played their part as the club dug out a draw away to Gaoth Dobhair last week and Devine feels that will bring them on.

“You need to be bringing through one or two every year and that’s something we need to look at as a club,” said Devine, who was joined on the sideline by Jonathan Scanlon, Pauric Boyle, Conor O’Donnell Snr, and Brian MacIntyre.

“We were lucky we had a good cohort a couple of years, (Kieran) Tobin and Shane (O’Donnell) and Ciaran Moore and these boys but there hasn’t been a huge influx of players the last couple of years and that’s something we need to address.

“We’re all looking at other clubs and the success they’re having at underage and we’re well aware of what’s coming down the line and we need to be matching them. We need to be bringing through one or two players each year.

“They can take serious confidence coming into Magheragallon and coming away with a draw is not an easy thing to do, the idea here is to give these boys football, we just want them to step up in the next year or two to senior football.”

Evan Hickey, Odhran Ryan, and Evan Daly all played for the county minors this year and they showed well against Gaoth Dobhair.

Devine says he has a young panel and contrary to what people might think, they haven’t got a massive pick to select from.

“I think Noah Barrett is the only one overage next year.

“A lot of those boys hadn’t had much success at underage, we kind of thought we’d be under a lot of pressure coming into this year’s championship, we got a good result against Aodh Ruadh and a good result against Gaoth Dobhair.

“Look all you want is a good honest effort, in fairness they’re young, we have 17 year olds, 18 year olds and look it’s a great learning curve for them and we dug deep and that’s what we want to see in Eunan’s teams and they showed it in abundance with the energy and commitment and it’s brilliant to see.”

St Eunan’s are through to the knock-out stages and now it’s about finishing as high up the rankings as they can.

They are due to face Naomh Conaill on Saturday, and it might not be a bad time to play them as their seniors take on Scotstown the following day and the likes of Finnbarr Roarty, Max Campbell and Shea Malone might be held in reserve.

Devine said: “Look there’s some serious opposition in Division 1. With Glenties you just have to list out a few of the players in the u21s and they’re the main men in the senior team and with Glenswilly and Four Masters, we just want to be competing with these teams and in fairness so far we’ve done that.”