‘Disappointed we didn’t get a win out of it, no doubt about it’

CORK manager Kieran Kingston was naturally left less than happy with the result at Walsh Park but could at least take some positives away from Walsh Park.

“We are very disappointed with the loss,” Kingston said.

“Obviously, we came down here to win. I thought we could have gotten at least a draw out of it, at the end, but disappointed we didn’t get a win out of it, no doubt about it. The bottom line is we scored 3-17 and didn’t get a win away from home, here at Walsh Park, which is not an easy place to come to, so, yeah, disappointed.

“But one of the pleasing factors was the way we threatened the goal at times; we got three and could have had another one or two, maybe, so that was a pleasing aspect of the game for us.

“However, scoring 3-17 was great, but our conversion rate was very poor, compared to them, and frees conceded were very poor, so they are things that we can work on and it’s good, at this time of the year, to realise that.”

Cork’s early goals provided them with a great platform but it was one on which they were unable to build. A tally of 17 wides was certainly something to point to for Kingston.

“You’re not going to win with a conversion rate like that or conceding that amount of frees,” he said. “Look, you can make excuses about time of year, etc, for the misses, but there were plenty of them we should have converted.

“We were playing into the breeze and we focused on getting a good start and we got that. We took our foot off the pedal and let them back into the game, conceded some unnecessary frees and missed chances that you’d expect to be taken, being honest. We’d eight wides in the first half alone and most of them were scoreable.

“We targeted getting at them early, got two [goals], got three overall and on another day we could have got five. That’s something that this team has been criticised over the last number of years, not getting enough goals.

“So it’s something we are working on. But today is only one day, we did create some chances, that was one of the most positive things from it.”

There were also bright spots with strong individual displays from Robert Downey, Damien Cahalane and Shane Kingston, while Kieran Kingston felt that the youthful nature of the team shouldn’t be overlooked, either.

“A lot of guys showed up well today,” he said, “guys that had been going well in training and in the Munster league, up until halftime in the final against Limerick. Guys have a lot of hurling done with their colleges too so it was good to see players putting their hand up early in the year.

“It was great for Robert, a 20-year-old playing full-back in his first league game away from home.

“You had a 22-year-old at centre-back [Tim O’Mahony], a 22-year-old centre-forward and full-forward [Darragh Fitzgibbon and Shane Kingston respectively], so it was nice to have a young spine up through the middle today.

“They all acquitted themselves well.”