Contrast between victory and defeat all too vivid for O’Connor
IN hindsight it probably wasn’t the best place for the press pack to conduct the post-match interview with Kerry boss Fintan O’Connor.
Yes it’s good to get the manager’s insights when the event is still fresh in the mind, when the emotions are at their rawest – it doesn’t hurt either to get it as soon as possible with deadlines looming – but to do so on the pitch on Sunday afternoon, while Westmeath were celebrating well within earshot seemed to highlight the contrast a little too much.
As the Kerry manager opened up, the Westmeath celebrations were in full swing and raucous less than five metres away. Olé, olé, olé and solemn lamentations make for curious bed fellows.
“Look we’re very disappointed. We’ll just have to go again,” the Kildare native, still visibly hurting from the defeat, admitted.
“Look in fairness to Westmeath, I said it coming into the match, we’ve played them three times in the last twelve months and we haven’t beaten them. We have to improve to beat them and until we improve we won’t beat them and that’s what we have to do.
“I thought Westmeath were kinda noticeably stronger than us in a lot of the contact area. They seemed to be able to hit harder than our fellas and look that’s something when we have so many young fellas, but they have a lot of young fellas too and they were very good today and fair play to them, more luck to them.”
In hindsight the game was arguably won and lost in the first half when the Kingdom missed a number of chances – taking nine out of sixteen – and only carried a five point lead at the break.
“Probably was,”
O’Connor continued.
“And look in fairness I suppose the conditions weren’t easy and most teams it takes probably five or ten minutes to get into a game and it took us those five or ten minutes to get into it.
“I thought Westmeath set up well, they were well-marshalled on Shane Conway. I thought at times he wasn’t given as much protection as he could have been in the first half. I didn’t appreciate the way he was kind of singled out going up to the game either, but that’s neither here nor there.
“We’ll go on to the Joe McDonagh and we’ll try to improve and look we’ll be playing Westmeath down the road and we’ll look forward to meeting again.”
The difference between this game last Sunday and the one in Tralee was quite evident, especially when it came to the performance of Westmeath full-back Tommy Doyle, who on this occasion had the better of Kerry’s Mikey Boyle.
“I suppose it was a real titanic tussle with them in Tralee and it was the same today and maybe he [Tommy Doyle] came out on top of it today, but the ball going into Mikey wasn’t good enough ball either and any full-back will savour that, but look he’s a serious full-back and a serious player and those type of tussles are what makes us come to the matches. Mikey will go again.
“He has a fairly nasty shoulder injury there so hopefully he’ll be alright come Joe McDonagh time.”
Despite the disappointment there were positives to take out of the game, even if it didn’t quite feel that way in the moment for O’Connor.
“It’d be hard to take positives today,” he said.
“But we’re trying to improve, we’ve a fair bit of improving to be doing to match Westmeath. I think we’re favourites to get relegated out of Joe McDonagh so look we have a lot of work to do between now and the Joe McDonagh and we’ll have to get down to that.”