What they said

Kerry manager, Peter Keane

It [the three in-a-row] means nothing to me and I don’t think it means a whole pile to those fellas. This is different. I’ve been saying this and I’ve been repeating myself on it, you’ve fellas there today winning their first All Ireland medal so it’s not like they won last year and the year before. That doesn’t happen you can’t play minor at Under 16. They hadn’t been here last year – some of them had – and the year before so there wasn’t the pressure on them like a senior team to win the three in-a-row that’s different. History is great. Somebody was saying to me as I was coming off the field that we hadn’t done it since the thir ties and if it is the case it’s great and it’s great to say we equalled some gang in the thir ties, but so what? It was all about these fellas winning an All Ireland medal and that’s what it was. The coaching structure [in the county] has been good. I suppose there’s a lot of vibe about it over the last couple of years and it is good – and it has been good for a number of years – but ultimately it comes down to players. Look as coaches we can sometimes get carried away and talk about how good we are or not, but if you don’t have players you won’t win games and we have very good players at the moment and that’s it.

Galway manager, Stephen Joyce

Unfor tunately in the first half we just didn’t play. I’d say we were a little bit nervous going into it and they had that bit more experienced. This was their third game, a lot of them played colleges finals earlier on in the year. They probably star ted a lot better. We took a lot of wrong options, it took us nearly twenty minutes to score and I think at the end of the day that caught us. We did come back into the game well in the second half and we looked like we might have had them on the rack, but unfor tunately young Clifford got another one and put it in the roof of the net and that probably killed off the game. We [found it hard to break down their defence], they were getting numbers back pretty quickly, but at the same time had we steadied a small bit we did get some good scores in the second half. When you concede three goals in an All Ireland final it’s awful difficult to win. We were back within a couple of points when the third goal came and if it hadn’t have come at the time and we got it down to two or even one I think anything could have happened, but unfor tunately it wasn’t our day. They’re a very good, very skilful Kerry side as we’ve seen all year. Nobody came within seven or eight points of them, it was a six point loss today, but I don’t think they were six points better.

David Naughton, left, and David Shaw of Kerry celebrate following their side’s victory during the Electric Ireland GAA Football AllIreland Minor Championship Final match between Kerry and Galway at Croke Park in Photo by Seb Daly / Sportsfile