By William Dunne

After shipping 27 points in defeat to Meath, Louth manager Colin Kelly says that his players must improve in all areas of their game if they are to progress in the All-Ireland SFC.

The Wee County will look to set the record straight this Saturday evening when they host Longford at the Gaelic Grounds in Drogheda.

Their attacking approach to the Meath game inevitably allowed space for Meath’s forwards which they evidently exploited.

Despite conceding so many scores at the back, Kelly feels that defence isn’t their only area of concern heading into the fixture.

“You want to improve in all areas of your play”, Kelly told GAA.ie. “It’s not just about keeping it tight at the back we only scored 12 times against Meath which isn’t enough.

“There’s other areas of our game and skill set that were off. We didn’t pass well enough, we didn’t tackle well enough. We had a couple of handling errors. 

“Overall there is loads to work on so just improving the defensive end of things is only going to get you so far. It has to be an all round improvement."

Louth exceeded the expectations of many this year many by making it back to back promotions in the League as they made the jump up from Division Three to Division Two.

The challenge now is to follow up a successful League with a long Championship campaign, something they failed to do last year when beaten by Derry in the first round of the All-Ireland Qualifiers.

Kelly is keen to avoid the same fate again this year, though he knows they'll have their hands full with a Longford team that has a proud history of taking big scalps in the Qualifiers.

“When we came into the league, we were odds on favourites to be relegated”, said Kelly. “No one outside of the dressing room gave us a chance.

“Now we must reset the gauges for another push for championship. We didn’t do it against Meath, we done it in patches against Wicklow.

“I thought it was disrespectful to Wicklow, the way people wrote them off. We didn’t do it against Meath and that’s something we have to question because that’s two years in a row that we failed.

“It’s something we spoke long and hard about since the Meath match and we have another opportunity now Saturday against a really good qualifier team.

“They have proved year in and year out that they have the capability of turning over teams such as Monaghan, who people now talk are they a top four team, and Down which is always difficult to do and Cork who they ran really, really close.

“So it’s a great opportunity for our lads to go out and express themselves on Saturday and get a result.”