We’ve plenty to work on, admits O’Shea

KERRY manager Pat O’Shea and Clare boss Frank Doherty reacted in varying fashion to their teams’ performances in Killarney yesterday, with both finding fault with particular aspects of their game.

However, the big difference is that Kerry advance to the Munster final, whereas the Banner are consigned to the Tommy Murphy Cup.

While Clare stepped up on their first-round display, they still fell short of the required standard while O’Shea conceded that it wasn’t ‘a great performance’ from the champions either.

In particular he was disappointed with the way the team played in the first half. “We felt we didn’t play well. It was stop-start, there were a lot of stoppages in play and a lot of time wasted with certain things. There was no fluency in the game, but you have to play every way. Thankfully we were in the lead and thankfully we got off to a good start in the second half and closed out the game.

“Right now we want to progress but we also want to try and work on our performance, after today we’re going to have plenty of things to work on.’’

Taking a more positive view, he feels that his team will benefit from the game, adding: “I hope we will come on from it. We obviously have to learn from what we did today and obviously there is improvement that needs to be done.’’

For part, Doherty was disappointed that they didn’t get more from the team after half-time, feeling that they had been there or thereabouts in the first half. “We were playing to the best of our ability, but that’s an awesome team. And what they coming off the bench was scary, not to mind what’s on the field.

“But, I have to give credit to lads. We probably played for 45 minutes or thereabouts. The sending-off of Conor Whelan was a big minus to us. Then again, Kerry can kick on when they want and they upped it a gear. We just didn’t have the answers at the time for that.

“I was confident of a better performance than we gave in Ennis. For us, it was a ‘have-to-win’ game against Waterford because we had lost the year before. I felt if we had lost again it would have put Clare football back a number of years and we couldn’t afford that.”