What they said

Kerry manager, Eamonn Fitzmaurice

What did we learn? Eh.. I dunno yet. I suppose from our point of view it was always going to be a tricky game. We needed to come up and we needed to have a professional attitude. Get in, get the job done and head back for Kerry again. It is that. There were aspects of our performance that were very good. There were other aspects that we were a bit off and a bit rusty today, but it’s great to have gotten the game under our belt. It’s great to be back here in four weeks time and we’ve plenty to work on over the next couple of weeks. Brian [Ó Beaglaoich] played very well today I thought. He loves playing on the wing, but his natural habitat is probably inside. He played all his colleges football there for us in the inside line and he’s always been very comfortable inside there so he played well today, he’d a great game. [Tony Brosnan] has done well in training, his training form has been good, he’s been pushing. He got into panel, then the match day squad and he got onto the pitch today so it’s the same principle as always if you’re going well in training and you’re testing the boys out you’re going to put yourself in the picture and he did well in that cameo as well, it was great for him.

Clare manager, Colm Collins

You’d have to say that we didn’t play well today. We played very poorly today, I thought, but I suppose you can look at that two ways. You can look at your own team or you can look at the quality of the opposition and how well you’re allowed to play. We turned over ball today, we didn’t conver t chances and were sloppy in a lot of ways so in par ts some players looked a little dead on their feet for whatever reason. There’s no hiding from it the better team won and fair play to them and you’re only as good as you’re allowed play. Nobody wants to develop another defensive team, so we said that we’d go out and keep it tight for the first ten minutes and then go back to our normal game. We were doing quite well, I suppose up to the goal, and there was a bit of luck with the goal, that we had tackled well and could have turned it the other way. Some of those chances, we’d a couple of decent chances, in the second half we’d a couple of rattles off the woodwork, but listen that’s not to hide the thing. The best team won and fair play to them. Obviously when you get beaten the first thing everybody will come up with is you’d to play four weeks in-a -row, I don’t think it was necessarily a factor. These fellas play football, it’s what they do, they love playing football.

Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile Kerry supporters Ruán, left, age 7, and Fionn Houlihan, age 8, from Ballyduff, in attendance at the GAA Football All-Ireland Senior Championship Quarter-Final match between Clare and Kerry at Croke Park