By John Harrington

Derry manager Damian McErlain says having full access to his Slaughtneil contingent of players from the start of the season was key to Derry’s triumph in Division Four of the Allianz Football League.

In three of the previous four years, Slaughtneil’s All-Ireland Club Championship campaigns have limited the involvement of their players with Derry during the winter and early spring.

But because they were beaten in the Derry club championship for the first time in five years in 2018, McErlain has had the luxury of building his Derry team around a core of Slaughtneil players this season.

Seven of them started Saturday’s Allianz Football League Division Four Final against Leitrim and were to the fore in the Oak Leaf County’s four-point victory.

“You are fit to build a team because you have the best players all there playing and training together night in, night out uninterrupted and us following one training programme, that's the only way you can operate at this level,” said McErlain.

“You cannot follow two training programmes and you can't sort of dip in and out. We would notice lads get injured and miss out for 2 or 3 weeks and when they come back they are off the pace for a week or two until they get up and running, it is such a high level and that's even in Division 4.

“That's the difference between Division 4 now and in 1985, everybody is well conditioned and well prepared and all the rest.

“So to answer your question about the Slaughtneil players, absolutely, you want all your best players on the pitch and training with you, week in, week out. It's great that they are part of the Derry set up and long may that continue.”

It took Derry some time to get into their stride against Leitrim in Saturday’s Final, and they found themselves trailing by 0-7 to 0-4 after 23 minutes.

But they then scored six unanswered points before half-time that ultimately laid the platform for their 0-20 to 0-16 victory.

“We were giving the ball away to them and we were trying to force it going forward,” said McErlain of their early struggles.

“So they were breaking it all the time so you are putting your defenders under pressure at that point. We were trying to give that wee slip pass to create that killer score earlier.

“Once we had a wee bit more patience and didn't force those balls we started to take control of the game.

“I suppose probably the most pleasing part of the performance was the fact that we settled our heads, started to control the game and kicked six points in a row to go in three points up at half-time and that was the key part of the game for us.”

As pleased as McErlain was with the victory over Leitrim, he believes his team will have to improve significantly if they’re to defeat Tyrone in the Preliminary Round of the Ulster SFC on May 12.

“If we give ball away like that against Tyrone they will just score at the other end, whether it's a point or three points,” said McErlain.

“Those are the learnings, that's the difference between us bringing the gap between playing in Division 4 - Leitrim and ourselves were probably significantly the two best teams in Division 4, you probably saw that today as well - but we've now got to step it up another gear in terms of pace, athleticism, opposition punishing mistakes., etc, so we have loads to take out of today.

“We're by no means the finished article but we have Tyrone there to absolutely sharpen the focus.

“There'll be no nonsense, we had all the favourites tag to deal with today and all the talk about Leitrim and we managed that well.

“These things all help the group to mature and hopefully we can do that and give Tyrone a bit of a game.”