AS DERRY prepare to defend their National Football League title against great rivals Tyrone at Celtic Park on Sunday, their key forward, Joe Brolly, yesterday supported the team management's policy to rest up to 14 members of the panel.

"It is clear to us from the past few years that we need to revitalise the team generally. Certainly the forward line needs new blood."

Brolly has shared prominently in Derry's All Ireland and National League success twice this decade and can identify with the team's current difficulties. "We need to look at our midfield situation. Brian McGilligan is coming to the end of his career."

Henry Downey was later named yesterday as Anthony Tohill's midfield partner.

Successive championship failures after successive league triumphs, says Brolly, "is a cause for concern".

"We need to put ourselves into perspective after the last few years and accept that we have problems. We need to improve our scoring rate and we also must address our diminishing ball winning capabilities in midfield."

His Dungiven clubmate, Brian McGilligan, is significantly left out. "Brian's knee problems are similar to Paul McGrath's. His knees are very bad. He wasn't able to train with us last year, he was mainly on the exercise bike."

Brolly insists that it is now important for the panel and management to "start taking ourselves a little bit less seriously and be more modest".

"We built ourselves up and felt that we were the best team in the country and felt that we would go on winning All Irelands. To that end, we probably pressurised ourselves a little more than we needed to."

Brolly is among a number of Derry players who are convinced that playing the game is an end in itself. "I will always advocate just playing the game and get stuck into that sort of approach. We tightened up in vital championship games became we were too tense, too brittle, and lost with trophies to the forefront of our thoughts."

He pinpoints the main reasons for Derry's championship failures over the past two years despite the promise and morale in the camp generated by league success.

"We perhaps had too high an opinion of ourselves as a team. We started serious training too early last year. We peaked too early. This year we are going to leave the hard training until February at the earliest.

"It now must be realised that it was a mistake for us to start training for more than a night a week in October. There is a "catch 22" situation here, of course, when you don't train early. The spotlight is always on you. If I am not scoring they start saying, `Look at Brolly, what is he at'."

Derry's top scorer welcomes the new faces in the panel in typically good humoured fashion. "Personally, I think that after five or six years, seeing the same faces four to five times a week begins to get boring after a while. You need to jazz it up a bit."

Is there a lot of new talent in the camp? "Time will tell," says Brolly. "We have four or five 18 year olds and many others are in the 19-20 age group. As many as 17 new players have been introduced to the panel. The idea is to give as many new players as possible a genuine chance, playing in at least one match before Christmas."

With his club, Dungiven, reaching the club championship county final there has been little time to relax. Brolly however, is one of the few players who yearns for more matches. "I don't think there are enough matches. I enjoy playing in the league but I don't enjoy the training.