‘CORK DIDN’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING SPECIAL’

STEPHEN O’DONNELL didn’t try to mask a crushing sense of dismay after yesterday’s latest loss to arch rivals Cork City. For the Dundalk captain, this was one FAI Cup final that got away from the Lilywhites — and it felt like a body-blow. It wasn’t so much the penalty shoot-out that will lodge in Dundalk craws through winter, but the concession of an equaliser deep into extra-time, almost to the point where black and white ribbons were about to adorn the famous old trophy. ‘It was a bad goal to concede but we didn’t do enough when we were on the ball at 1-0 up,’ reflected a crestfallen O’Donnell. ‘You’ve got to be able to kill the game, maybe get another goal but we kept on giving it back to them. ‘We invited them on to us and they didn’t really have to do anything special to get an equaliser,’ he added. O’Donnell (right) felt Dundalk, so battlehardened under Stephen Kenny, should have known how to close the deal after Niclas Vemmelund headed them in front with a superb effort. Indeed, you could count on your fingers in the past three years where Dundalk blew a lead in a game that mattered. Yesterday, when it mattered most, they faltered. ‘Once you go up in a tight game like this you have to see it out, there’s no other way about it, you have to see the game out. ‘We knew that they would throw bodies on and went direct but as a team we have to see it out,’ said O’Donnell. The Cork equaliser was one that almost got away from them as Gary Rogers got a partial block to Achille Campion’s left-foot strike. ‘I got a foot on it and sometimes that can be enough to take it away but unfortunately it crept through,’ said Rogers. ‘At that close a range, if you can get anything at all on it sometimes it bounces off you and goes miles away but it wasn’t to be today.’