Positives outweigh the negatives for a bullish Fitzmaurice

IN these post-match situations – or the pre-match ones too for that matter – Eamonn Fitzmaurice isn’t the type of guy to get too carried away one way or the other.

Throughout his four year tenure in the role very few of his utterances have caught the public imagination – save for one slightly off-colour remark after last year’s league final. The Finuge man is low key, deliberately so, but also we suspect just out of his natural inclinations.

Defeat on Saturday evening hurt him and his team, but it didn’t wound him, not grievously so. There’s a bigger picture and his eyes remain firmly fixed on that. Fitzmaurice isn’t the type to mistake a bump in the road for something altogether more serious.

“Of course we’re disappointed we didn’t get something out of the game,” he said.

“We played a lot of good football in the first half, but we didn’t convert our chances really when we were on top, particularly goal chances and in Division 1 you’re not going to get too many goal chances and when they do present themselves you have to take them and we didn’t.

“The second half then there was probably a lack of experience / leadership there as the game went on and we just weren’t able to grind out a result even to get a point out of it. We lost James [O’Donoghue] before throw-in, he was in a race against time, similarly with Paul [Geaney] and Killian [Young], both niggles more than anything but at the same time we didn’t want to risk them getting something serious.

“Three players that played very well for us last weekend we were without them after fifteen / twenty minutes, so we probably ended up with a lot of our more inexperienced players on the pitch at that stage then.

“We would have expected to have played better in the second half in general. I don’t think it was just shot selection, it was a lot of things. We made a lot of mistakes in possession, we were error ridden in the second half, but I think, like I said, the balance between experienced players and inexperienced players certainly got stacked towards the latter in the second half and that can happen.

“You’re playing a very battle hardened outfit in Mayo and it was going to be a tough battle and we knew we were going to have to be at our best to beat them in the second half.”

One issue Fitzmaurice wasn’t happy with was the concession of so many frees. Cillian O’Connor slotted nine frees and had another three chances from the placed ball that he didn’t avail of.

A lot of that was down to poor tackling by the Kerry defence, but Fitzmaurice did suggest that, perhaps, the referee, Armagh’s Padraig Hughes, made a couple of questionable decisions.

“I think there was a bit of both,” he said.

“Definitely we’ll have to look at our discipline, Conor McManus is coming to town in a couple of weeks and he’s very accurate so we’ll have to be more disciplined. Still I thought in the first half there was a couple of very hard calls.

“Mark Griffin he was coming out with the ball and he was being pulled and there was frees for over-carrying given against him whereas at the other side it was very hard to get those frees, but when there’s nine frees converted you have to look at your discipline and we have to improve it for tomorrow two weeks.”

Overall the positives outweighed the negatives. While people will naturally focus on a second half that saw Kerry stutter, Kerry’s brilliant first half cannot be discounted either. Nor can the encouraging performances of young guys and Under 21s.

“The thing with the Under 21s is that with the scheduling of the Munster championship we have to be fair to the Under 21s as well. If there was an emergency situation where we were short, of course we could pull them in if we need them for National League, but that’s not a situation you want to develop from the point of view of the players.

“Even with Tom [O’Sullivan] and Jason [Foley] we didn’t start them because they’d Sigerson during the week. We’d have loved, given how well they’d played last weekend, to have given them another start tonight, but we just felt it wouldn’t be the right thing to do having played Sigerson Wednesday and having gone to extra time in particular with the match after the long bus journey from Donegal, so overall we’d be very happy with the Under 21s.

“I think the big difference this year compared to last year is that last year they were only in for a couple of weeks and were gone and that was it, they hadn’t been in with us the previous summer whereas last year all the lads had trained with us consistently.

“There were ten or twelve who trained with us over the summer for all the championship so they would have been exposed to that and we would have been exposed to them, so the fact that they’re going back now we know well what they’re capable of. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the Under 21 championship to see how they’re getting on there.”