FERMANAGH Manager Ryan McMenamin says that they just have to move on quickly from last Saturday’s chastening defeat at the hands of Derry in Owenbeg with the focus now on a big game against Longford at Brewster Park this Saturday.

Indeed, the Derry game will be forgotten about if Fermanagh can go out and beat Longford this weekend – and Derry don’t lose to Cavan – as it would see them progress to the league semi-finals and keep alive their promotion hopes.

“We have put it to bed and we trained really, really well on Monday night and the whole focus now is on preparing for Longford,” said McMenamin.

“It is maybe forgot about that we are still in the hunt for promotion, and I think at the start of the year if someone said to you that you would come into the last game with the chance of a promotion semi-final spot, then you would have taken it.

“We knew we were in a very tough group with the Ulster champions and Derry, who are probably the two favourites for the division, so to have a fighting chance coming into that last game is great.”

The fact that there is a game coming up straight away is also a plus says McMenamin.

“It is great that you don’t have too much time to dwell on it and you just have to move on to the next game.It is the nature of the beast that is the league,” he added.

“Look, nobody likes getting beaten by 18 points, and once you go back home you feel embarrassed about it, but as I said to the boys, ‘You can’t keep looking back, because no matter how much you want to, you can’t change that result’.

“The only result they can change is the Longford result.

“You can’t let every result define you – at the end of the day we aren’t the first team to lose like that, and we won’t be the last.”

And he feels that with so many young players in the squad, defeats like last Saturday’s can happen, but the key is that they learn the lessons from it.

“You can hit a bump on the road with young players. When you look at the likes of Tiarnan Bogue, Josh Largo Elis and Luke Flanagan, there is maybe only six to eight national league appearances between the three of them, so it is about learning from this.

“They will have seen what it takes to be a county footballer at the top, top level, and that is what we want to expose them to.”

Longford go into Saturday’s game with two defeats, but McMenamin is expecting them to be a tough test for his side.

“They shipped a heavy defeat like ourselves against Derry and then against Cavan they were right in the game up until midway through the second half, but those losses have come against two very good teams, so you can’t really read too much into them.

“They are a good side with some very good players, so we have to be prepared for them,” he added.

And the Erne boss wants to see more aggression from his charges on Saturday.

“It is going to be about work rate and aggression. We felt on Saturday we were maybe a little bit too flat, and we will have to look at that from a management point of view to see why the lads were flat and if it was something we were doing wrong. We need to bring aggression and a will to win.”

In terms of injuries, there is a doubt over Captain Eoin Donnelly, who came off in the first half against Derry, but McMenamin says that they will assess the Coa man later in the week.

“It is down to the physios and he was with the physios on Monday and they will take another look at him on Wednesday.

“There are a few lads who were carrying niggles who weren’t in the 26 last week, like Lorcan McStravick and Ultan Kelm, and hopefully they can maybe put their hands up as well,” said the Fermanagh Manager, who will pick his squad for the game based on who performs at training this week.

“We’ll look at it, but we’ll judge everything on training. There were a few lads who put their hands up on Monday night to get into the squad and into the team, and we’ll see how it goes on Wednesday night too,” he concluded.