McDermott laments Banner errors

CLARE boss Micheal McDermott accepts he and his management team face a massive task to motivate their charges for the All-Ireland qualifiers.

McDermott’s men were crushed by the All-Ireland champions in a devastating final quarter and the Banner chief admits his side made too many mistakes at critical stages.

McDermott struggled to pinpoint the exact causes of their downfall: “It’s difficult to know what happened in the last 12 minutes because we were very competitive for most of it.

“Turning to play with the strong wind in the second half the instruction to the players was to take the game to Cork and we did that for long periods.

“But we lacked leadership on the field at a crucial stage in the game when we could have got at them and maybe made life a bit more difficult for them. Despite the final score-line, we can take a number of positives from the game. When we got the ball into our forwards we caused the Cork full back line a lot of problems. There were periods in the game when we did very well, but it comes back learning from our mistakes, and we made a lot of them.

“We carried the ball into the tackle when it should have been laid off, and gave away possession far too easy.

“We’ll talk about that in the coming days and hopefully remedy the mistakes ahead of the qualifiers.

“The power, strength and physicality of Cork at times, was something of a mismatch in a lot of areas of the pitch, and that’s what we have to try and progress towards.”

McDermott said he did not see the incident involving wing forward Graham Kelly and Cork defender John Miskella.

“If it’s a case of he being sent off for a head butt offence, I would not condone that kind of behaviour, because I’m very much a man who lives by discipline both on and off the pitch.”