Derry made mistakes but Mickey Harte never lost dressing-room - Brendan Rogers

Brendan Rogers insists that the Derry footballers didn't lose faith in former manager Mickey Harte but he accepts that their early-season focus this year might have led to the subsequent disappointing championship campaign.

The Oak Leaf county came into 2024 as two-in-a-row Ulster champions and fancied as All-Ireland contenders.

They won the pre-season Dr McKenna Cup and beat Dublin in the Allianz Football League Division 1 final but lost their first three games in championship to Donegal and eventual finalists Galway and Armagh, before exiting in the quarter-finals against Kerry.

Harte departed shortly after, having been in charge for less than 10 months, and has now been replaced by fellow Tyrone man Paddy Tally.

"I don't think it was a case that players just switched off to management after winning the National League," Rogers told RTÉ Sport. "Nothing like that happened.

"There were a lot factors. I think both players and management could have said that we'd have done things better.

"Did we execute on the pitch the way we should have? And maybe the management takes the flak for it. Were our tactics perfect? I don't think anyone's tactics are perfect all the time. There's so much variability and change that the players have to deal with and maybe we didn't do that well enough.

"It looks like the wheels fell off the wagon and that things fell apart but that wasn't the case. I just think we did a few things wrong at critical times and we were punished heavily by very good teams and very organised teams.

"We still managed to turn around and beat Mayo [in the preliminary quarter-finals] after all that negative thing and would you have said that was a bad result? So the capability was there. It was just that on certain days it