Cork well tested by Louth
After exerting vice-like control on the first-half proceedings and at one juncture enjoying a 0-9 to 0-2 advantage, Cork were hanging on at the finish. Louth, full of heart and valour in the second-half, trimmed the gap to a single point when wing-forward Declan Byrne lobbed over a 58th minute point. Then in injury-time the chance was presented to them to secure a dramatic winner.
Midfielder Richard Brennan was sent bounding through and as he went to unleash a pile driver, Cork wing-forward Daniel O’Donovan got back to make a timely block. The intervention took the sting out of Brennan’s shot and the ball was gratefully gathered by Cork netminder Paddy O’Shea. Cork hung on from there and manager Mossie Barrett was in a state of high relief afterwards. “To say I’m relieved is putting it mildly. We really dominated the start of that game. In that first 20 minutes, it was like Munster all over again. We stopped doing what we were doing well and we gave away a few sloppy points. I thought in the last ten minutes of the first-half we started to give the ball static instead of direct. We were opening them up completely.
