O’Brien concedes that better team won

FORMER county star John O’Brien has me his fair share of top teams and classy footballers over the years and he admitted that Rhode were just too good for his O’Mahony’s team on Sunday.

‘That was a step up from anything we’ve come across,’ he conceded. ‘Ten minutes after half-time they got a run on us and that left it very hard. We had chances ourselves, but that’s the way it goes.

‘We pride ourselves on keeping it tight, but it just got away from us after half-time. But when you have players like Niall McNamee, it doesn’t matter how well you man-mark them, they always stick over their chances and that’s what happened.

‘We were happy going in at half-time and we though we might get a bit of a push on after the half-time break. We had a slight breeze behind us. We tried letting a few into Conor [Crawley] and some of them didn’t really come off. We’ve had a bit of luck along the way and it probably deserted us a bit today, so we have no complaints.’

Rhode appeared to have swatted up on their hosts and O’Brien felt that their vast experience was crucial too.

‘I’d say they expected to play Sarsfields, but I think after that game they probably took a bit more notice of us and did a bit of homework. But they’re very strong and they’ve been around and they certainly know how to close out games. They got players back when they needed to and breaking forward they were very strong.’

Bespite the disappointment of losing at the penultimate hurdle, O’Brien agreed it has been a fairytale season, but he was already looking ahead to 2017.

‘If you had said to us at the start of the year we’d be county champions and that we’d put up a good show against Rhode in a Lenster semi-final you’d definitely take it. But we have to knuckle down now and make sure this isn’t the end of the road for us. We think there’s another county title in this team and that’s what we’re going to aim for next year.

‘Hopefully we’ll have the same team next year and we’ll have to up it again. Rhode are a good example of a top senior club team and they’ve proved that over the years. Hopefully we can learn from this and move up a notch next year. We have a few good minors there like Sean Murphy and Christopher O’Neill. It’s very hard to throw them into the deep end at this level, but they’ll be pushing hard next year.’