McCarthy offers no excuses at end of a dire fornight for Cork

THERE was no excuses coming from Cork manager Ronan McCarthy after a second half blitz by Tyrone saw his side crashing out of the All-Ireland SFC, following a sixteen-point loss at O’Moore Park, Portlaoise on Saturday.

Cork certainly would have been happy to be level at four points apiece after 22 minutes, but it all began to unravel after that, with the Rebels scoring just one further point before the break, and nine more scores overall – two of which came in second half injury-time.

McCarthy stressed the work begins now to turn things around, but didn’t expand on his thoughts in detail of a forensic plan to bring the 2010 All-Ireland Champions back from the brink in 2019.

“I have my own ideas on it that I’m not going sharing now,” he said.

“After the first year, I’m very clear in my mind where I need to go here and where we need to go but I’m not going to share that.”

McCarthy was keen to point to the long-term with this Cork squad, after two bad back-to-back defeats in the Championship, including their biggest loss to Kerry in 80 years.

“What I would say is that a lot of people pointed to the three-year term,” he said.

“We were very clear with the players that we wanted to get as much as we could out of this year. I think the danger with three-year terms is that three years down the line you may not have made much progress so you have to try and get the most out of the year.

“We felt after Tipp, we had a mixed league and there was a lot of kind of people making excuses for us about injuries and everything else and players not being available. We then beat Tipp and got a bit of momentum and it’s disappointing that we haven’t built on the momentum we got from Tipp.

“That said, look it has to be also said about the players that they’re a very, very honest group of players, they train extremely hard. They don’t deserve what has happened out there but that’s life and you don’t always get what you deserve and that’s it.

“The basics of commitment and training, dedication and work and everything else are there but they’re not coming out on the pitch and therefore we must go a different way.”

One might have thought that a 17-point loss to Kerry might have rattled this Cork camp negatively, but McCarthy stressed that it didn’t have a resulting impact on how his side played against Tyrone.

“I’d look at it very differently,” he stressed. “I felt that when I was playing and you got a beating like that, you were out of the championship. There was no chance to recover.

“Here, you know, we had two weeks, a chance, a real opportunity to set ourselves up. I don’t think so but even if it did knock the confidence out of them, you still have to come out and go out and perform and unfortunately, it hasn’t happened again.”

From a Tyrone perspective one would have expected Red Hands boss Mickey Harte to be elated, but there was a tale of caution from the most experienced of inter-county managers.

“We would have been disappointed with our first half performance, because we were creating plenty of chances but not actually taking them. A few goal chances went abegging and that’s not always good.

“I’m still happy that we were creating chances. It’s better creating chances than not creating them – even if you are missing a number of them, but it still isn’t good.

“We almost found to our cost against Meath. We had a really good first-half, we shot them out the gate at half-time, and then suddenly we found ourselves in a real battle, so we didn’t want a repeat of that.

“Maybe that’s what experience does for you. It teaches you to be careful and work hard when you get a bit of a lead, and expanding it rather than letting it contract. We’ve got away with some things that I know in the latter stages of this Championship you would pay dearly

for.”