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SOMETHING Joe Brolly said before the Waterford v Kerry match last Sunday serves as a pointer to why this game might not be the walkover all sides expect it to be. In prefacing the hiding Waterford were inevitably about to receive, Brolly launched into one of his hand-waving tactical treatises, saying that Waterford, had they any intention of actually winning the game, would have worked out a system of containment for Kerry, dropping men back, squeezing the play and holding the game down until late on. Instead, he feared - and he was right, of course - they'd go out and have a go and try to play a bit of football and end up flame-grilled.
So far, so Brolly, so what?
Thing is, Brolly - who still plays club football in Antrim for Belfast side St Brigid's - is close to Jody Gormley, the Antrim manager. Indeed, Gormley has had him around the place at training sessions, ostensibly "doing a bit of work with the forwards", in Gormley's words. Somehow, it's difficult to see at least Brolly's tuppence-worth not having been thrown in somewhere along the way. We can take it that Antrim will be deploying some class of containment strategy here as the game finds its feet.
Not that there's any great hope of it paying much of a dividend. Neither Gormley nor Paddy Crozier has seen any reason to change the teams they named for last Sunday so the same rules still apply. Antrim's very young team will do extremely well to keep within touching distance of a Derry side that can still break glass and push the Paddy Bradley button in case of emergency.
They're not likely to need to.
Verdict Derry ANTRIM S McGreevey; T Scullion, P Doherty, K O'Boyle; S McVeigh, G Bell, J Crozier; J Quinn, M McCann; A Gallagher, K Niblock, J Loughrey; CJ McGourty, K Brady, P Cunningham DERRY B Gillis; M McGoldrick, K McCloy, G O'Kane; P Cartin, SM Lockhart, C McKeever;
F Doherty, J Conway; B McGoldrick, C Gilligan, J Diver; R Wilkinson, E Muldoon, M Lynch ULSTER SFC QUARTER-FINAL ANTRIM v DERRY Casement Park, 3.30 Referee C Reilly (Meath)
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YOU ARE HERE: 11 November 2007 / tribune.ie / 2007 / 06 / 10
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