Meath manager is left seething after controversial calls
‘AND what did you say to the referee afterwards,’ one inquisitive hack put to a physically drained looking and emotional Andy McEntee after his side’s controversial exit from the championship.
‘I’m not too sure what I said. It was hardly too complimentary in all fairness,’ came McEntee’s reply. ‘Is it a sickener? Of course it is, I think probably everyone has the same emotions after that game.
‘You put your life on hold and then everything finishes like that,’ McEntee fumed. ‘It’s one of the reasons why fellas go off to America. It’s one of the reasons why fellas don’t declare for inter-county football. You’ve got to get the basics right. Refereeing is a fairly basic requirement.
‘Here we are again, talking about referees deciding games like that and everybody walks away. The same happened in the hurling last weekend.
‘Everyone is concerned about a speck of blood on Donal Lenihan’s jersey and he has to come off the pitch for that, and we can’t get things like that decision at end right. It’s very hard to take.’
Regarding the penalty call following a foul on Cillian O’Sullivan, McEntee said: ‘He’s [the referee] standing, what, less than 10 yards away from Cillian O’Sullivan who ends up inside the small square.
‘I’ve seen it on the camera. He ends up inside the small square, and he gives a free? I mean, he played five minutes of injury time, they score in five minutes and 30-odd seconds.
‘Players put their lives on hold and then the whole thing gets decided by a couple of very poor decisions. That’s the hard bit. Players miss a free or they drop a ball or they foul somebody, they pay the price out there. What’s the price for what went on out there today?’
However, McEntee was fulsome in his praise of the effort the players gave.
‘You could see with fellas that they just didn’t have a whole pile left in them at the end, and that’s what you’re looking for, all the time. That’s what they’re capable of and it needs to be like that on a little bit more of a consistent basis. That’s been the issue. But I’d never question any of those fellas. They put in a massive effort.’
McEntee is now at the end of his second year of a three-year term, with a review before he takes up that third year. However, he was undecided where he goes from here.
‘Where do we go now? We have to wait until January before we play another game. That’s the killer. And we had the same with Waterford last week. But they have another game next week, they have a chance to put it right, we don’t. So we pay the ultimate price.
‘I’ve a family, all the management team have a family, all the players have families, wives, girlfriends, there’s one or two kids in there. So everybody gets affected by this.
‘There’s too much time, there’s too much money. Everybody talks about the amount of money that’s spent training teams. This isn’t Mickey Mouse stuff any more. This is big time. This affects peoples’ lives, this affects people livelihoods, their personal lives, everything like that.
‘People have to be aware of that,’ he concluded.