Thankfully Pat Flanagan disagrees with you and i agree with Pat Flanagan, he wants to get Offaly out of the bottom tier as quickly as possible like he did with Westmeath as he believes that if you stay in a lower league too long you become accustomed to playing sub standard Football and there fore standards will have dropped within the team and i believe he is right. this team in my opinion has the football ability to play in the top half of Division 2 at least, all they are lacking is confidence and they will not get that by hanging around division 3 for the next 5 yearstownman wrote:no we wouldn't have done any better than longford today, go back to the last day longford played offaly off the field for the last 20 minutes, even their best player again offaly Smyth the half back who scored 2 points again us was took off but to be fair as Colm O'Rourke said the likes of longford and offaly are coming from division 4 theirs not a hope in hell would they give the likes of the Dubs a game in croker or anywhere else come championship time. for offaly its staying in division 3 next year should be the aim and work at it over the coming years, i was raging that we lost in tullamore the last day but looking at that today maybe its a blessing that we weren't there, i know they say you only learn playing the best but tell me what did longford learn getting the sh.t kick out of them today.
As for the Dublin Longford game, while i will not dispute that we would have done any better than Longford today,but in order for us to improve we will have to face up to the fact that we will have to play the best teams eventually if we are ever to have any ambitions of winning a Leinster title and running and hiding from the big boys will once again do nothing to improve us, yes we probably would have gotten beaten by a big score like Longford today but if the players are afraid of measuring themselves against the big boys even at this early stage of their development (in other words adopt Townmans mentality of running and hiding) then we will never progress as a team or even a county.
Yeah a hammering can be damaging in the short term but if you never measure yourself against the best how will you know if you are improving or not?