Brendan Rogers has acknowledged that putting ‘a lot of emphasis’ on winning the National League may have backfired on Derry this year.
The 2022 and 2023 Ulster champions blazed a trail throughout winter and spring under new manager Mickey Harte, winning McKenna Cup and Division 1 league titles.
In the case of the league, it was the first time a team from Ulster had won the competition since the Derry side of 2008.
Speaking at a promotion for this year’s AIB sponsored GOAL Mile, Rogers rejected that ‘the wheels fell off the wagon’ after the league but the All-Ireland hopefuls did lose four of their six Championship games.
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They fell at the first hurdle in Ulster by conceding four goals to Donegal and were ultimately beaten by Kerry in an All-Ireland quarter-final.
Asked if, looking back, Derry put too much stock in winning the league, midfielder Rogers said it may be true.
“Possibly, yeah,” he nodded. “We did put a lot of emphasis on it. I suppose we wanted to prove ourselves that we could consistently perform at a Division 1 level.
“Maybe we put too much emphasis on that and we got something to learn for next year, to strike that balance, but look, you could never not go for the league either. That’s the other side of it.
“If you went in saying, ‘Ah well, we’ll not worry about the league, we just want to focus on the Championship’, then if the league doesn’t go well you’d be saying, ‘We didn’t get any momentum from the league’.
“I suppose one thing we did learn from Mickey in that regard was never take anything for granted, win whatever’s in front of you because there’s no guarantees of success, in life in general.
“So you have to take every opportunity as it comes and we followed that mantra with the McKenna Cup and the league. We wanted to win those things. Would the Championship have been any different? Who knows. At least we can look back and say we ticked those boxes.
“I guess it’ll not be a thing on our mind to sort of focus on the league so much anymore, that maybe we kind of learned from that, how we can manage our season better, develop from that.”
Rogers said Derry’s apparent collapse, having started the summer as genuine Sam Maguire Cup contenders, was down to ‘a lot of factors’.
“I don’t think it was a case that players just switched off to management after winning the National League, nothing like that happened,” said the Slaughtneil man. “You still have an admiration for what they brought to us. I think there were too many variables around, did we execute on the pitch the way we should have? And maybe the management takes the flak for it.
“Were our tactics perfect? I don’t think anyone’s tactics are perfect all the time. There’s so much variability and change that the players have to deal with and maybe we didn’t do that well enough.
“Was everybody’s bodies right going on the pitch? You know what I mean? There were so many things that could have went on. I think, both players and management, could have said that we’d have done things better.
“Look, it looks like the wheels fell off the wagon and that things fell apart but that wasn’t the case. I just think we did a few things wrong at critical times and we were punished heavily by very good teams and very organised teams.
“We still managed to turn around and beat Mayo after all that negative stuff and would you have said that was a bad result? So the capability was there. It was just that on certain days it didn’t work for us. They just seemed to be bigger days than most in terms of publicity and size of crowd and stuff at games.”