Seven-point winning margin flattered us says McCarthy

RONAN McCarthy is getting a good taste of what it is like to be the head honcho in the Cork senior football set-up.

After losing to Tipperary on the opening day of the National Football League Cork bounced back the following weekend up north before facing up to Louth at home last Sunday. So, three national games in and the manager has already run the gamut of emotions.

Last Sunday was the third different experience McCarthy had to try and explain and, while it would be easy to accept the win and just move on, the new manager chose to call it as he saw it.

“We were very poor,” said the head tactician.

“A very poor disjointed performance, particularly in the second half. We kept falling back which doesn’t suit us as a team, we need to be pushing forward all the time.”

While McCarthy was struggling to come up with reasons for his side’s poor display he didn’t feel it was down to complacency or the fact that his side had two players sent to the line early.

“We prepared for this one the way we prepared for the other games. It would be unfair to the players to say it was that as they all worked hard and prepared properly for it but it was just a poor performance. I don’t want to use the sending-offs for the display either. I didn’t think we were good in the first half when we had fifteen so I am not going to blame being down to thirteen.

“It is a very busy time of the year I suppose and a lot of guys have put in a lot of mileage on the pitch over the last three or four weeks so maybe that told a bit. This was the third weekend in-a-row and maybe that was a factor in today’s performance.

“We also made a lot of changes, a couple of them enforced changes, we left out NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE DIVISION 2

Cork the Sigerson boys and maybe all that added to the disjointed look but really that is not an excuse for us. We felt that players coming in should be able to just slot in and so on but look we won – that’s two wins now after losing our first one and I feel we are back on track.”

McCarthy was also displeased at the way his side were opened up on more than one occasion, which could ultimately have made the day an awful lot worse.

“That was a concern alright especially after we had looked so solid against Down, but look you try to encourage the team to attack and be positive and there is a fine line between that and it going wrong. “They broke through a couple of times where we had no one between our midfield and full back line and Ryan [Price] made a few good saves – the score line didn’t really reflect the game at half-time, it was hard on Louth as they could have had one goal if not two to that point and as they game went on in the second half we just became more and more disjointed, falling back more and more, so really at the end I think the seven point victory flattered us.”

It wasn’t all doom and gloom however as McCarthy was able to find benefits from the exercise.

“The two positives are we won the game and we got to bring in new people, players getting debuts and all getting game time but other than that this was a very poor, disjointed performance, but look we got there however not with any great conviction.” McCarthy will look to get the best out of his new side in the coming week’s with Sigerson and Nemo players all likely to boost what is the sleeping juggernaut of inter-county football.

PWD 3 2 0

L 1

Pts 4