What they said

Kerry manager, Peter Keane

I suppose the historic is of no relevance to us at this moment in time. We came here to win and win we did and that’s what we’re happy to have done.

I wouldn’t go as far to say he [David Clifford] was untouchable, but he played very, very well. I think we created a lot of space for him, we gave him some great ball in. He’s had a great year and again I think our defence was outstanding as well and that was the cornerstone of it.

What do you do at underage football? Everybody talks about a sweeper, but the field is big, probably too big for a sweeper, a sweeper can get lost, so what can you do? The main thing is to put pressure on the ball outside and not let it in. I don’t know if they were right to or were wrong to do what they did. You do the best with what you had. Same with us.

We had a defence that had a lot of question marks on that game after the game against Cavan that got two goals from high balls and you could see the way Derry did that as well, trying to put in high balls, but the reality was we just didn’t have fellas over six foot in the defence so like I couldn’t put extentions on them so we just had to forumate something that we could block it whatever way we possibly could.

Derry manager, Damian McErlain

Yeah a tough start to the game. A goal after seventeen seconds was tough. The aim of the game was to take Kerry on and see if we could press up on them and see what we could do attacking-wise and there was nothing leading up to the match so say we couldn’t do that. Kerry played very well today and going down early made it all the more difficult.

An early goal was a target of ours and try to get on top and pull them out a bit and stretch them, but look they’re a serious side, seriously athletic as well as being seriously good footballers. We struggled all over the pitch.

[David] Clifford is a serious target, granted he’s got the ability that he has, he’s got size and physique and everything else. They had some tremendous players, running off the shoulders was very good as well. We failed to contain that at times too, but the boys tried manfully and kept going right to the end.

We tried to shake it up a wee bit at half-time in terms of bringing on Callum [Brown] again and Deccie [Cassidy] and Conor Quinn and they all did rightly in the sense that they gave us a wee bit of freshness, but lookit it was a tough task coming in after half-time you know.