Coach kept his half-time talk to ‘very few words’
‘We have to rectify the mistakes we had last year’
WHEN Cork left Clare waiting on the field for the start of the second half, it was tempting to imagine John Meyler going full-blown Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday. Bringing the reigning champions’ dressing room down with a stirring, emotional, call-to-arms.
Sometimes the truth is a little bit more mundane. As the seconds ticked by and the Clare players stood waiting on the pitch for Cork to come out, a bit of reorganising and re-focusing was going on as much as anything else.
‘There was very few words at halftime really,’ insisted Meyler, who has certainly made his own mark since taking over from Kieran Kingston this season. ‘Really the game was won in the last five minutes of the first half when we went eight points down and got it back to four. To go in four points down at half time was critical and we had a few words to say at half time but in fairness to Donal [O’Mahony] and Fraggy [Kieran Murphy] we got our composure back.
‘Our work rate wasn’t good enough in the first half. We were sloppy; we were a yard behind Clare so all we needed to at half-time was get that composure back in and in fairness the two lads did that at half time.’
With Donal Moloney suspended from sideline duty, Clare joint manager Gerry O’Connor pointed to that period just before and after half-time as being decisive, Cork blitzing Clare from the restart and hitting seven points to just a single Peter Duggan free.
‘They came out at the start of the second half and you have to give them great credit,’ said O’Connor graciously. ‘The reality is they were worthy champions last year and they are worthy champions this year. They played really good hurling in that 15-minute spell just before half-time and I think that’s where the game was won and lost.
‘We stabilised things after 15 minutes of that second half but they appeared to get on top of our halfback line. The half-forward line stormed into the game, they seemed to get a lot of scores from there. That 10 or 15-minute period just after half-time, we missed a few frees, they got a few handy scores and that’s just the nature of it, we just weren’t able to get a foothold on the game after that.’
Duggan’s usual unerring free-taking let him down on a couple of occasions and with Clare unable to get a foothold around the middle third against a now rampant Cork, they simply couldn’t feed John Conlon who was such a scoring threat in the first half.
‘That’s why they’re champions and worthy champions. The game is played over 75 minutes; we just weren’t able to get possession from our own puck-out as regularly as we were in the first half and as a result of that there was a lot of ball being cut out by their half-back line and feeding their forward line. Also, as a consequence of that our supply to our full-forward line, particularly to John who was having an excellent game in the first half, we were being starved of possession inside in the full-forward line in the second half.
‘We’re in a quarter-final now, it’ll be Carlow or Westmeath or Wexford. We’ll go back and we’ll feel sorry for ourselves tonight for a while but we’ll refocus and do our recovery like we’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. It’s a short turnaround but maybe that will suit us. The reality is we’ve got to go and prepare diligently for an All-Ireland quarter-final in two weeks’ time.’
Cork goalkeeper Anthony Nash echoed the view of Meyler and others that the squad had a big point to prove after last year’s All-Ireland semi-final blow-out.
‘Back-to-back doesn’t mean a woeful amount to us but it just puts us back where we were last year, AllIreland semi-final — we just have to rectify the mistakes we had last year,’ said Nash.
‘John is very good going into the dressing-room and saying that’s it done, move on. We’re unbeaten in Munster but now we’re in the AllIreland series. Munster will mean nothing above in Croke Park in four weeks’ time.
‘It just puts us in a position where we have to learn from our mistakes last year, push on in the things we did well and stuff, and hopefully the lads will enjoy this evening, concentrate on next week when we’ll get back at it.’