Healy laments lack of ruthlessness

Despite getting off the mark with their first win of the season and providing the home support with plenty of talking points, Felix Healy rued side’s “lackadaisical” attitude in not seeing off Mervue United in a more ruthless manner on Saturday night.

Harps failed to build a comfortable margin against Johnny Glynn’s side, who battled gamely despite being reduced to ten men in the first half following James Casserly’s sending-off.

The visitors twice got back on level terms after strikes from Adam Clarke and Kevin McHugh before the Harps skipper converted a penalty to give the home side a one-goal lead going in at half-time.

Thomas McMonagle then made it 4-2 early in the second but Jason Molloy grabbed his second of the game as Mervue were able to salvage a little bit of momentum late on in a game where they really should’ve been dead and buried.

“I’m pleased with the three points but not happy with the performance at all,” was the immediate reaction of the Harps Director of Football.

“It’s as poor as we’ve been. We didn’t play like that at all in pre-season. We didn’t work hard enough when we didn’t have the ball.

“We started off okay, we went 1-0 up and we were coasting, it was so easy. And then, Tommy McMonagle slips on the pitch and it’s a different ball game. But it’s a learning curve for the guys tonight in terms of their own development.”

A series of defensive errors seemed to shackle Harps’ creative ingenuity in attack and Healy admits his young side have a lot to learn in terms of realising their full potential.

He added: “I've just said to them – there’s nothing easy in life, there’s nothing easy in football, and the minute you think it gets easy, you will get your backside kicked and that’s what happened to us tonight.

“There were too many guys that were lackadaisical and at times it was too easy but you've still got to do your job when you don’t have the ball and really good players don’t let it go to that level.”

Healy cut a disgruntled figure when asked about the state of the Finn Park surface, which looked atrociously heavy for the first game of the season.

“There were mitigating circumstances tonight because I thought the pitch was as flat as a pancake – it was awful. It didn’t suit in terms of the tempo we wanted to play at, particularly when we had the ball, we could have moved it about and tired them a bit more.

“It’s a bit of a pudding of a pitch at this moment in time and it didn’t help. I’m not using that as an excuse because players should have dealt with it, but they are youngsters.

“Some of them are still learning, some of them still developing and it’s important that they learn from one or two mistakes they made tonight. The concentration levels for the second and third goals was very poor,” said Healy who didn’t rule out the possibility of signing another centre-half in light of Keith Cowan’s expected absence over the coming weeks.