Gilroy blames Dubs’ lack of resources

ULTIMATELY it came down to a question of resources in Pat Gilroy’s mind.

When scrutinising where yesterday’s decider went wrong for his charges, the Dublin manager believed there was sharp contrast in the depth of his panel and that of Cork boss Conor Counihan.

“I think we got a clear lesson today that their squad proved to be stronger than our squad,” he said.

“And that was the winning of the game. I think when we lost the likes of Bryan (Cullen) and Bernard (Brogan) we really struggled after that. It was probably indiscipline last year.

“We didn’t finish with a very strong team in comparison to them today. We learned a lot about our resources. We have guys who have been playing and guys who came on and maybe we are just a little bit shy at this level.

“We have a lot of guys coming back from injury and maybe those guys can push into it or those fellas need to improve.

“We were playing very well, but we were shipping fellas all over the place. The loss of Alan and Eoghan O’Gara and a few others didn’t help us in terms of our strength and depth.

“It is disappointing to lose by a point when you have been eight up and probably could have been 14 up with the chances we created.”

Gilroy believed there were positive facets to his team’s performances but cited aspects of their defensive and attacking play that require attention.

“It’s very frustrating in a way but there are plenty of things there for us to work on. The middle of the field for large parts of the match went very well.

“Our backs did reasonably well but 21 points was far too high a concession rate.

“We created so many chances. If we had got four or five goals in the first half then it would have been a completely different game. We seem to like learning lessons and I’ll be glad if this is the last one.”

Midfielder Michael Dara MacAuley sung from the same hymn sheet as his manager and cited the clinical attacking play that Cork displayed in front of goal as critical to the outcome.

“We had opportunities ourselves, but we just weren’t clinical enough. It could have swayed the momentum in our half. We had plenty of opportunities and we just didn’t take them.

“We should have tried to break up the momentum a bit better than we did. They started going through the middle and we should have stopped them. We have to go back, we have a few weeks off no and we’ll have to see where we went wrong.”