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O’Neill ponders future as manager of Crokes

Harry O’Neill will speak with Dr Crokes chairman Vincent Casey before deciding whether to continue as manager.

However, O’Neill stated last November that he had promised his wife he wouldn’t be in charge for the 2012 Kerry championship.

O’Neill, a member of Eamon Fitzmaurice’s Kerry U21 management team, made no excuses after Saturday’s defeat, saying the Killarney outfit didn’t do enough to win the game in the second-half.

Speaking about next season, he said: “It’s going to be difficult for these guys to get out of Kerry, that’s the big ask for them. But they have the experience from Munster.

“It’s a hard defeat to take but these guys have been to the school of hard knocks. However, they’ve shown that they can bounce back.”

Admitting Crossmaglen’s third goal scored by Aaron Kernan after Chris Brady had drawn Crokes level had knocked the stuffing out of them, O’Neill said: “We hadn’t really played in the second-half and yet we were still in it, we got back to level terms.

“They had 14 and we had 15 and we should have been the team that was driving on at that stage.

“I don’t think there was any stage in the second-half where we got a period of sustained pressure and momentum going.”

O’Neill acknowledged some of Dr Crokes defenders were caught in possession but defended them in light of the sparse options in front of them.

“You look at the workrate our fellas put in during the first-half and then there were times when our backs were coming out with the ball and there was no-one there. Fellas can say x, y but we got turned over because nobody was showing for them. That’s a testament to Crossmaglen and the pressure they put on us.

“We didn’t work hard enough around that middle of the area to get fellas out into the space so we could pop the ball out to them.”

He continued about their wind advantage after the interval: “We just didn’t make the ball stick inside in the second-half. You could even see them (Crossmaglen) in the first-half that it was difficult to pinpoint passes with that wind because that ball was going at you like a cannon.”

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