Match Review written by Matt O’Rourke
Match week 3 of the League of Ireland went to shambles as unexpected snow descended on parts of the country , causing multiple match cancellations, although Sligo wasn’t affected badly and the match went ahead thankfully. Shelbourne came away with a graceful 1-0 victory against Sligo in their home ground, not a bad result by any means.This match is also the debut of our new away kit. My thoughts? It’s ok, I’m not going to but it but I can see why people like the kit and also why people dislike it.
Now I’d like to touch on the pitch inspection announcement:
Due to the snowy weather, it wasn’t announced till a late enough time that the pitch was fine to play on. Due to this, multiple buses full of Shels supporters got cancelled because of the uncertainty of the fixture going ahead. Delightfully a decent number of supporters still made it there and made the atmosphere in the away end louder than the Sligo fans, noticeably a lot louder to put it bluntly, I don’t remember hearing a Sligo chant, in fact the only time I heard them was when they celebrated their disallowed.
Anyways enough talking about that decaying club and it’s dull supporters, let’s talk about the first half:
Early enough we get a corner , 11th or 12th minute give or take, and we go short but send it into the box, goes towards the back post, finds John OSullivan and he knocks it in 1-0. A good goal for him, and it could be a turning point in his career, maybe it could give him a boost to become a solid member of our squad.
At the 26th minute McGinty fumbles the ball and Liam Burt tries his best to capitalise on the mistake but couldn’t. Could’ve easily been 2-0 there, but it is what it is.
Soon after, in the 27th minute the ball gets whipped into Shels’ box where Waweru meets it and knocks it past Kearns, but Kearns goes down. Initially the referee says it’s a goal but the link disagrees, and eventually the goal is considered disallowed.
Just before the 30th minute, Sligo have another scary attack but it’s closed down again by our formidable defence.
The 37th minute sent all Shels fans into a heart attack as Kearns is caught outside his box when Sligo are at the edge of the box but Sligo could never get a goal out of the situation, and in the 38th Paddy Barret goes down after clearing the ball and going down in the process.
As things go, a pretty regular half of play, well continue onto the second half: Nothing really of note happens until about halfway trough the 56th minute, where if you were paying attention Liam Burt turned into prime Ronaldinho for a minute and slotted the ball in between a Sligo played legs, but unfortunately gets caught up to and intercepted. We can only imagine if that Sligo player didn’t recover so well, but we move on. In the 69th minute Sligo have an alarming attack, ball gets to Power and he shoots, Conor Kearns saves it, and from this point on really there wasn’t anything of note apart from a few dangerous corners from Sligo which got cleared. So we jump to the 91st minute where we see 6 minutes of added time, but Gannon went down. This meant the full time whistle was blown in the 98th minute, and that secures another 3 points on the road for the Auld Reds. Overall, I thought our performance was great, I couldn’t really point out any flaws. Kearns had a good game as always apart from that one threat when he was outside the box.
Our back line was solid as always today, a key performer in the match I’d like to note is Paddy Barret who had a good day out in Sligo, stopping multiple attempts by the Sligo attack.
As midfield goes, we could’ve been a bit better but overall I’m happy with our performance. I thought we were strong in the first half midfield wise but slowed down as the game went on, especially in the final few minutes.
And the combination of Jarvis, Smith and Burt at the start was really impressive. I felt that for the first half they were all over the Sligo defenders, and we were much more of a threat then them.
Now my man of the match goes to no other than John O’Sullivan. I thought his performance was very strong, and hopefully we’ll see more of these performances as we progress through the season. His goal was nice, and he was creating great opportunities throughout the game. Definitely deserved my high rating of him.
As we reminisce on the game, we were clearly the better team throughout the game, even with a few hiccups. Im very happy with the form we have at the moment, joint top of the table with Derry, and as we role onto next week with Galway at home on the Monday and Bohs away on the Friday.
Bring on Galway this Monday, get a strong performance and stay top of the table going into Bohs away.
Thank you for reading my match Review on Shelbourne away to Sligo.
UTFR