Derry City boss Declan Devine unhappy with second half display at Shelbourne

Devine was annoyed with the “soft” goal his side conceded to the Dubliners as, for the second week running, the Candy Stripes failed to get on the front foot until the concession of a goal following Ryan Brennan’s equaliser.

“A lot of positives and a few negatives,” insisted Devine, “We didn’t come out in the second half. I felt the first half performance was okay but until they scored our second half performance wasn’t good enough.

“But listen, Shelbourne put you under serious pressure with a lot of high balls and a lot of diagonal balls into your box. We certainly didn’t set up in the second half to play in the manner we did. We got pinned in but we made changes and the changes affected us.

“We took a psychological blow with the news of Ally Gilchrist hurting his foot earlier in the week and James Akintunde failed a fitness test, so there were a couple of psychological blows we took. We took another one by conceding from a set-piece.

“I don’t know why we have to concede a goal before we respond. It was the same last week against (Shamrock) Rovers and it’s something that we have got to fix and fix quickly.

“Ally is a big loss for us and Darren Cole, who was playing his first match in 10 months, going off was a big loss but you can’t afford to switch off for a second in these games. It’s something we talked about all week and ultimately it has cost us two points. We have thrown a lot of points away over the last week and we have to make sure that we do better than that.”

Devine was pleased to see Ibrahim Meite get himself on the score-sheet and is hoping that goal will be the first of many.

“Ibra is a good player. He’s a real handful and did well in the first half but unfortunately we have players all at different levels of fitness,” added the Derry boss.

“I thought (Jake) Dunwoody when he came on was good. I thought Adam Hammill was also good but again we have to get these guys up to speed as quickly as possible, because they’ll be good assets for us moving forward.

“We have to keep putting them out there and we all have to buy into the ethos which is to make sure, first and foremost, that we are hard to beat. We haven’t lost the game and a point in Tolka Park, you can reflect on it and think that’s not too bad but when we have the game in our hands we have to manage it better.

“Our game management in the second half was poor, we didn’t keep the ball the way that we try to do in training. We didn’t do it as well as we could but we’ll sit down this week and we’ll make sure we’re ready for Cork.”