McCarthy: No arguments, we were beaten by a better team

IT may have felt like a lonely role for Ronan McCarthy to fulfil after yesterday’s Cork SFC final at Páirc Uí Chaoimh yesterday, but there was plenty who could empathise with his plight.

The Douglas boss joined his brethren in Muskerry, Dohenys and Ilen Rovers, who have all in recent years been tasked with explaining the genesis of a Nemo Rangers county success. McCarthy had no qualms here in tipping his hat in the direction of superiority.

“First of all, I want to congratulate Nemo on their four-in-a-row. We’ve no arguments. We were beaten by a better team on the day. They dominated the game throughout and we never got a foothold in it at all. We’ve no complaints.”

If there was regret on the part of Douglas, it was the flat nature of their display on the biggest stage.

“The most disappointing aspect of the day is that we never got going,” said McCarthy. “There were no undue nerves or anything like that. We felt going into the game that guys were going well. But you have to be allowed into a game as well. To be fair to Nemo they dominated the middle of the field all through. When you don’t have parity in that section, you have problems. Funnily enough, I thought we did well elsewhere, our back line held some of their star guys well enough, but we were well short of it in the end.”

The area of their game where the Douglas struggles were most evident was in the scoring department. They only registered five points over the hour and it took them until the 32nd minute to shoot their opening effort from play.

“We were very detached from our full-forward line early on. They were forcing us to kick long balls into our inside forwards. We needed to work the ball more into better positions. They had a period at the end of the first-half where they tacked on a couple of scores as well. But at 0-7 to 0-2 at half-time I would have felt that, since we’d shown such battling spirit in a lot of matches, we were still in with a shout. But we never really got a foothold in the game to have a go.

“Looking at it now, we struggled in the Ballincollig game and the two Ilen games to get scores. There was a lot of resilience and effort and so on, and it was battling qualities and defensive stability that got us through those matches. We’ve never been as potent as maybe we were in the earlier rounds of the championship. If you were told before the game started that we’d only concede 0-13, we’d have felt we were in with a right shout. But that’s not the way it transpired.”

Still McCarthy opted to retain a positive outlook going forward. His side are light on big game knowledge and the hope is that this experience will aid their future prospects.

“That’s what you hope. You hope the experience will stand to them. As they’ve done over the last number of years, they’ve shown great guts and character. This is another test for them and one that every player has to go through. The Nemo players have gone through it as well in the past. It’s really how you respond to it. Our players have never been found wanting in the past and no doubt they’ll respond in the right way again.”