Kingston disappointed

THERE was a large media scrum waiting outside the Cork dressing rooms in Pairc Uí Rinn last Saturday night for comment from the home side’s management team

It was hard to ignore the silhouette of Kieran Kingston emerging from the dressing room – all of 20 minutes after this game finished.

Kingston looked like he had something to say but went back to the safety of the room, however, when asked to come out again, he did he faced up to the hard questions.

“We are not as good as we were last week against Clare and we are not as bad as we were tonight. We are somewhere in between and we know we have a huge amount of work to do,” was the main line being put out by the manager.

“This was always going to be a tough game for us. Dublin were always going to rebound from the Tipperary game and we had spoken about that during the week. They were very hungry out there and we couldn’t match it. Of course we are obviously very disappointed with tonight.”

Kingston did look for some positives from the 70 minutes.

“We got back into the game by half-time and we thought then that we were in a good place and then we conceded a sloppy goal. We were struggling after that.”

Kingston is only too aware of the focus that is on this Cork team, particularly with the footballers not performing in the way Cork GAA fans would wish for so his job at this point remains two fold.

He now has to get this side back to where they were supposed to be last Saturday evening before they took on Dublin and he also has to keep expectations in check as another heavy defeat could be just around the corner.

Kingston’s emergence to the media huddle is more significant than one might think.

Managers often shy away from the questions when their team loses and on this occasion that looked to be the case, however, Kingston seemed to change his mind and face the pack, something that really can only bring positives to a side that are searching for leadership, both on and off the field.