O’Neill takes swipe at referee

DR Crokes manager Harry O’Neill criticised Tipperary referee Derek O’Mahony for the amount of injury-time he played at the end of yesterday’s Munster Club SFC final in Mallow.

“I was questioning the referee. Where did he get three minutes? We were confident we would have five minutes injury-time. There was a lot of time wasting from the goalkeeper and they had a couple of injuries where players stayed down for a long time. To come up with three minutes was strange. If we had that extra couple of minutes, then who knows because we were in the ascendancy, we had them under pressure.”

O’Neill admitted his team faced too great a task in the second-half after they were wiped out by a superior Nemo Rangers side in the opening period. The Dr Crokes manager also insisted that the absence of injured midfielder Johnny Buckley was not the primary reason for their first-half demise.

“Johnny was a big loss but I don’t know would he have been able to stem the Nemo tide. We were being over-run in many areas of the field. We were second to every ball and just didn’t get going at all. We were standing off Nemo and showing them too much respect. Everything they kicked went over the bar in the first-half. You have to take your hat off to them for that. If you’re not up to the pace of the game with Nemo, they will punish you and they proved that.

“The important thing was to get the lads in at half-time and regroup. We wanted to sort out a few things. There was no banging of tables or shouting. We just got focused. We’d belief in ourselves that we could win the game even if we were 13 points down. We drove at Nemo in the second-half but unfortunately, that hill was just too much to climb.”

O’Neill believes the age profile of this team ensures they will have further stabs at provincial honours but conceded that their first-half display will haunt them for some time to come. “That’s going to be the real thing we’ll be reflecting on afterwards. What if we had played in the first-half? That’s the most disappointing thing hanging over us now that we were two points away from winning a Munster after being 13 points down at half-time.”