Belnaleck 0-07 Erne Gaels 0-12

Erne Gaels picked up a third win from their fourth Club Players’ Competition game on Friday as they saw off Belnaleck by five points to send them top of 1A.

Wins over Belcoo, Roslea and now Belnaleck leave them a point ahead of Derrygonnelly after losing to the Harps in their second outing.

Manager Declan Bonner was pleased to see his side pick up another win, with players still to come back into the side: “It’s alright, we were down a number of players, I’m sure most teams are.

"It was good enough, we had a number of wides, six or seven, Belnaleck probably had five wides too in the first half. In terms of shooting accuracy, it wasn’t great.”

Bonner’s side will be hoping Belcoo can do them a favour by beating Derrygonnelly on Friday to stay top and have a chance to gain maximum points heading into the league.

“Happy enough to get the victory,” he added. “We are building nicely now to the start of the league and will hopefully start to get more players back in.

"It’s given other lads a lot of game time, which is important too, everyone in the squad is involved but in fairness, they are working away and their application has been good to be quite honest.” 

Meanwhile, Belnaleck suffered their third defeat from three and are still without a number of key players.

Belnaleck manager Daniel Kille said: “It was a game where we were looking for a performance rather than focusing on a result. We are operating off a very light squad at the minute, but I do stress the players are working very hard within it.

"Belleek are a serious outfit and we shaped up quite well against them for the majority of the game so I suppose we will take that as quite a positive from a performance point of view.”

Belleek raced into an early lead, going 0-05 to 0-01 ahead as Tommy McCaffrey led the scoring with points also coming from Greg McGloin and Aoghan Kelm.

The ‘Leckers came back into it with scores via Bryan Owens, Garvan Quigley and Glenn Treacy before half-time with Erne Gaels taking an 0-06 to 0-03 advantage at the interval.

Despite points from Owens, Glenn Treacy, Shay Gibson and James Speight, Belleek eventually ran away with the win after further scores from McCaffrey, Kelm, Barry McCann and Brian Mullin to close out the win.