Cobh Ramblers manager Stephen Henderson was to left to rue a lacklustre display from his team as Shelbourne secured a comfortable 3-0 victory at St. Colman’s Park on Friday evening. The result did not flatter Shelbourne one bit as they ruthlessly pi
Cobh Ramblers manager Stephen Henderson was to left to rue a lacklustre display from his team as Shelbourne secured a comfortable 3-0 victory at St. Colman’s Park on Friday evening. The result did not flatter Shelbourne one bit as they ruthlessly picked Cobh apart with fast, attacking football. The front three of O’ Sullivan, Evans and English impressed throughout the evening with the latter scoring two goals in a man of the match performance. An og by Cobh goalkeeper and captain Paul Hunt in the second half compounded the misery for Ramblers, a defeat which drops them back to 8th place in the table. Afterwards, Henderson was quick to acknowledge the performance from the visitors. “Shels came here in a very organised manner. They played the right pass at the right time, done it really quick, done it really simple and fully deserved their win. Shelbourne were very professional and took their goals well. Credit to them, they played very well tonight.” “We’ve gone back a little bit to where we were over a month ago. We were scrappy in our organisation. Normally we are decent passers of the ball but that didn’t happen today.” “Just before half time, we created a couple of chances so at half time we told our wide players to come in and get the full backs more into the match in order to get more crosses into the box. We felt like we weren’t penetrating them enough. As they did, Shels broke and scored. It was a killer goal psychologically for us because we are not great at coming from behind.” The defeat means Ramblers have only won a single league game at home this season and have scored only two goals at St. Colman’s Park. Impressed by Shelbourne’s ability to play “simple” football, Henderson pointed towards improvements needed before next week’s visit to UCD. “Whenever Shels had a shooting opportunity tonight they took it. If you look at us we are always searching for that little one-two or that miracle pass. We are delaying crosses into the box. We are taking a touch and coming back and then everybody is marked up and things break down. There is an issue there in the final third. We have improved defensively but we now need to focus on getting goals, we just don’t score enough.” “Our home record has been horrendous. We can’t away from that. We got off to a poor start at home this season and we haven’t recovered from it. It was always going to be tough for us this year but it shouldn’t be this tough. We are too inconsistent this year. Normally with young players you get long bursts out of them and then we go through a little inconsistent patch but for some reason this year we are just not getting enough consistency in the team. We are making it harder on ourselves. To get turned over 3-0 at home to Shelbourne is not good so we just have to start again, clear the decks, get back into training and be ready for UCD next week.” “We are going to have to better. If you give them the ball they’ll punish you. They are a very well drilled possession based team. If we give the ball away as easily as we did tonight we’ll be in trouble. "We need to get our organisation right and be aggressive in how we press them because that aggression was missing here tonight.”
