'We were relentless from start to finish'- Portarlington winning manager Pat Roe

The Portarlington footballers secured their fourth Senior county title in five years on Sunday afternoon and their first under the management of Pat Roe against Portlaoise.

Roe gave his initial thoughts on the win after Ronan Coffey had lifted the Jack Delaney Cup aloft in Laois Hire O’Moore Park.

“I'm very happy with it, I thought it was a great performance overall from start to finish. We were three points up at half-time and we could have been more with a couple of great goal chances early on. Didn't take them, but I thought we were relentless today, from minute one to minute 60, we kept doing the same thing. We talked about the process, sticking to the process, shining a light on what's right, just keep doing the simple things really, really well and I thought that's what we did throughout the game,” Roe said. 

For the first time all year, Roe had Colm Murphy, Robbie Pigott and Paddy O’Sullivan at his disposal. He had a plan for how he was going to use all three lads in the game against Portlaoise.

“We had a plan for that. We'd started Colm because he'd had three weeks with us, but we wanted Robbie and Paddy to be able to launch them when the game was there to be pushed on and they did and it was a real psychological fill-up for us, but also football-wise we were able to push on from there,” he said.

Portarlington lost a good few players since their last championship win but Roe knew that the panel he was taking on still had plenty of potential to get their hands on the Jack Delaney Cup yet again.

“People thought I was mad, I looked at that team and I saw winners. These are lads who've won three out of the last four county championships and there was the core of a winning team still there. Those lads know how to win and again, you could see it today, they just knew how to win and they rose to the occasion,” he added.

READ NEXT: 'The biggest honour of my life'- Ronan Coffey on captaining Portarlington to Laois SFC glory

The first-half had been a very even contest with only a Jake Foster goal separating the sides at half-time. Portarlington had missed at least three goal chances and knew they should have been further ahead.

“The chat at half-time was that we were three points up, we were where we wanted to be. We knew we should have been further ahead but we pinpointed the first 10 minutes of the second-half as the time to put the foot to the pedal and really drive on from there. During the league, we'd lost games in the first 10 minutes of the second half and we endeavoured not to let that happen again. We felt we had superior footballers and we felt we had a game plan that would work. We wanted to impose our game on Portlaoise and for the most part I thought we did that,” Roe commented. 

Next up for Roe and his players is a game against the Wicklow champions which will either be Baltinglass or Tinahely with that final due to be played on Sunday, October 20.

“We'll re-centre ourselves. We'll take a few days off and celebrate this, it's a great win for the lads and we'll give them a chance to celebrate that and then we'll have a look again at that,” he ended.