Bowles: our girls did everything that was asked of them

RICHARD BOWLES had only one thing on his mind when he entered the Galway dressing room and spoke to his team after they had lost their All-Ireland crown to Cork.

It was going to be next to impossible to try and lift their spirits and he didn’t need to be told that. But he took solace from knowing the character of the girls and the friendships within the 30-strong squad which he hoped would ease the ‘rawness’ they felt within.

“They are all desperately disappointed - the amount of work that everybody has put in since the end of December when we came together collectively, and to have experienced the high of last year,” he said.

“There’s an awful difference between that and the experience today. But, they are excellent footballers - and excellent people, which, in a lot of ways, is more important.”

Bowles, involved with the group for the past three years and appointed manager when PJ Fahy stepped down 12 months ago, didn’t believe that Galway suffered from being overwhelming favourites. As far as he was concerned, the preparation over the last two weeks had gone very well and there was “a huge hunger and a huge desire” there to win again.

“They are an absolutely fantastic bunch of players and for me, that’s the bottom line. They have done everything we asked of them and much more. We came up against a Cork team we knew had fantastic footballers coming through.”

He believed the save made by Cork goalkeeper Elaine Harte and Valerie Mulcahy’s penalty for the Munster champions had a “crucial” bearing on the outcome. Things like these “were always going to make a big difference” in a tight game, he suggested.

Asked about the strategy of using only five forwards in the first half, he said he had been quite happy with the way the game had gone up to half-time.

“We seemed to have weathered Cork’s early dominance. They had a two-point lead, we came back and went ahead, and early in the first 10 minutes of the second half we had good scoring chances.

“But they got the goal and we didn’t and that really set the tone for the last 15 minutes. Once that cushion was there, it was going to be very hard to break it. We needed a goal to claw back and it didn’t look like coming.

“Other than that, our will to win was every bit as strong. I would pay tribute to the 30 players in the squad. They showed last year and again this year that they are immense footballers. But, more than that, they are immense people as well. There is fantastic character within the group and great friendship between them.

“That’s what you need in times like this - that when there is disappointment, that people stick together.

“Our defenders were excellent, it would be hard to pick out any one player above anyone else. The work-rate throughout the field was also very good. Maybe the final pass into our forwards wasn’t coming off, but that doesn’t say that people weren’t actually doing an awful lot of work and playing very well outside.”