Kernan hits out at the performance of referees
JOE KERNAN accused Australia of ‘torturing’ star forward Michael Murphy in yesterday’s second-test defeat in Perth. The Ireland manager also blasted match referees Maurice Deegan and Matt Stevic for failing to protect the Donegal star, labelling their performance as ‘diabolical’.
Murphy, who had scored 20 points in the first test, was not as prominent yesterday when restricted to just six points and Kernan suggested afterwards that the Aussies had targeted the tourists’ full-forward.
‘I thought the refereeing was diabolical,’ said Kernan (right). ‘Michael Murphy was tortured all day. If you look at last week we had handy frees given against our fullback line for holding men’s hands.
‘Murphy was being dragged all through [the game] and never got a free.
‘I don’t mind anyone being targeted if they get the cover — he got no cover in there today. We’ll look at the video, but I don’t need to see it to know that Murphy was tortured all day.’
‘Aidan O’Shea also got a forearm smash right in front of the dugout. It should have been a straight red but it wasn’t even ticked,’ protested Kernan.
However TV replays of the latter incident indicated that Aussie star Nathan Fyfe’s tackle on O’Shea was not head-high, and did not warrant a sending-off.
Kernan, despite his unhappiness with the officiating, conceded that it had not cost his team the series.
‘In the last quarter we were caught too many times on the ball. You can’t complain about the effort the boys put in. It was first class. A loss of composure at times did cost us.
‘We were being caught on the ball and we shouldn’t [have been]. We should have been moving it. Australia punished big time on that. In the third quarter, we lost the ball nine times, six times in our own half-back line which you can’t afford to do against a team as good as Australia.
‘We mightn’t have deserved to win by 10 points but we deserved to win the test. It’s very much a case of what might have been.
‘We had that game in the palm of our hands and didn’t hold it.’