Enniskillen Gaels Captain Richard O’Callaghan admitted that mistakes in the first half left them too much to do as they made their exit from the Ulster Club SFC at the hands of All-Ireland champions Kilcoo on Saturday night.

Kilcoo ruthlessly punished Enniskillen’s errors on the night while the Gaels failed to make the most of the limited chances that they had in the first half of the game.

“We never really got going in the first half and when we did get in and around them, we never capitalised on it.

“I thought that a couple of times we did show we could break them down by running at them but we didn’t capitalise through our own wee errors, like a misplaced pass of whatever.

“It was disappointing – we made too many unforced errors and turnovers where we handed them the ball at times, and you can’t do it at this level against a team of that quality,” said O’Callaghan.

Kilcoo brought an intensity and pressure that many of the Gaels players would never have encountered before and they struggled to deal with it at times in the first half, despite having had numerous warning about what was coming at training.

“You can talk about turnovers and how if you hand them the ball it is a guaranteed score, and these are things that were repeated many times at training over the last couple of weeks.

“Training has been very enjoyable and we have been working on new stuff that we hadn’t been working on, and the boys had reacted well to it, but it is only when you are actually in that environment and put under the pressure we were under, that you know what it is like.

“There are boys who will definitely have learnt from having now experienced that, the same way they have learnt the whole year.

“There were learnings from the Derrygonnelly game last year and then the Kinawley game this year, and there has only been a positive response from all those setbacks, so I would expect nothing but the same from this.”

O’Callaghan did feel that Enniskillen showed more of what they were capable of in the second half, although the game was already over at that stage.

“You have seen what Kilcoo have done in the past to teams – they are ruthless, and they would have been aiming to bury us, but we said we would go out and stick to what we had planned to do in the second half.

Errors

“Look, in the first half we messed up with the errors, but in the second half what we had planned to do came through, and the boys did well in terms of a pressing game and putting them under pressure from kick-outs higher up the pitch.

“That was what we had talked about prior, and we just wanted to put pride back into it, and we did that. That first half though had us killed.”

And in terms of next year, O’Callaghan knows that they will have to raise their game again as they become the team with the target on their back now in Fermanagh.

“We will have to raise it again. We got a stark lesson about where we need to be in terms of our intensity on the pitch and our decision-making on the pitch on Saturday night, and we’ll be hoping to improve on that for next year,” he said.