Frustrations should fuel

Paul Brennan got some reaction from a pleased, if a little frustrated, Dr Crokes camp after their Munster Club SFC semi-final victory

TEAM selector Harry O’Neill joked that he was happier to talk to the waiting press than go into a Dr Crokes dressing room still bristling with tension after a frustrating performance in this Munster Club semi-final.

It says much for Crokes’ expectation of themselves as a team that they were being hard on each other after a six-point win over another county championship winning team, but that’s a measure of where Crokes are at - or more correctly, where they want to be.

No ones knows better than manager Pat O’Shea, star player Colm Cooper and the rest that Sunday’s performance was lacklustre and sloppy - hence the harsh words in the post-match huddle and O’Neill’s hesitancy to head for the dressing room.

“I think there was a bit of frustration coming out there but that’s no harm,” O’Neill said, putting the post-match post-mortem in context. “Maybe if we took the frustration out on the field we might have won by a bit more but we didn’t. It’s no harm for that stuff, it’s grand. We’ll be back here on Tuesday training and get ourselves ready for a Munster Final.

O’Neill was equally straight-talking about the team’s performance over the preceding hour.

“It was a very poor performance from our point of view. I thought we showed a lack of energy and a lack of urgency out on the field. Sloppy in our delivery of passes, sloppy in our attempts on goal. Yes, we were very disappointed in our performance. We maybe managed the game a bit better in the second half but we didn’t perform better in the second half.

“The energy wasn’t there and you’ve to put a lot of that down to Loughmore-Castleiney and the way they played. They get in your face, they push up on you, they work hard, they chase everything down, but we should still have showed more composure out there today when we had the ball. We needed to show composure and we needed to match their high energy and we didn’t do that,” O’Neill, a former Crokes team manager, said.

O’Neill wasn’t offering excuses for the below par display but he did suggest that the team’s hitherto hectic schedule - which continues this weekend with a County League Final against Austin Stacks - before facing The Nire in the Munster Club Final the following weekend, could be taking its toll.

“This is eight weekends in a row that we’ve been out playing matches and it’s a hard ask on players to keep going. And your training schedule is curtailed a little bit too because you can’t just go straight into training the following week. It’s been difficult.

“We’re going out representing Kerry in two weeks. Personally I would love to lad to have a break and have a week to come together and have a couple of training sessions rather than juts doing one training session this week, a game next weekend and a recovery session after a county league final.

“For us to represent Kerry and be able to get three good training sessions in would really benefit us,” O’Neill added.

Meanwhile, Dr Crokes forward Daithí Casey wasn’t surprised that he and his team mates endured a tough sixty minutes of championship football where the hosts didn’t have it all their own way.