Dooley not making any rash decisions

OFFALY boss Joe Dooley was circumspect about his future at the final whistle on Saturday afternoon.

Two weeks ago he revealed his unhappiness with conditions in Offaly in a letter published in the Irish Examiner, but after narrowly losing to Cork in the All-Ireland qualifiers he was in no mood to make announcements about continuing with the team.

“I don’t know, to be honest I didn’t even think about it coming down here today,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have been in the right frame of mind so I said I’d come with my whole heart on winning, and that’s the way we approached it.

“We highlighted our difficulties in getting into O’Connor Park but that’s water under the bridge now.

“If I’m going to do it (continue) I’ll do it for the right reasons. It’s hard going. There were 100 sessions this year and that’s only the tip of the iceberg, with all the things outside that, as any county manager will tell you.

“You can do it right or you can do it for the sake of doing it. It’s a huge job, but we’ll think about that over the next couple of days – it’s not for this evening, it wouldn’t be fair to the players or anybody else.”

Dooley was clearly unhappy, however, with the scheduling of Offaly’s U21 Leinster championship semi-final against Dublin last Thursday.

“We lost Eanna Murphy in that game, which should never have been played. It was put back to Thursday night without any consultation with anybody.

“Maybe if he’d had another couple of days he might have been able to play – when you lose by a point you look at all the angles, all these things add up.”

The Offaly boss’s disappointment was compounded by the number of players out through injury – and his belief their season could have “opened up” if they’d won in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

“We were short a lot of players today and in a county like ours you couldn’t handle that, but the lads who went out gave everything, and you can’t ask for more than that.

“We came down hoping to win, that was our expectation. If we’d won our whole year would have opened up – who’s there to stop you? Tipp or Kilkenny in an All-Ireland semi-final? Giving everyone respect, we’d have had the capability to get that far, but unfortunately we didn’t, and that’s the end of this year.

“After Kilkenny and Tipp, Cork are without a doubt the next best team in the championship.

“We felt if we could get over them, with respect to the other teams, we’d have been well able to hold our own with them.”

He conceded that they’d needed a bit of time to adjust to having a spare man. “Things ran amok a bit and David Kenny sat back and wasn’t getting on the ball maybe as much as they were. The game plan lost its structure but I thought we adapted better in the second half – Dylan Hayden picked up a lot of ball and we got more from the extra man in the second half.”

Despite the outcome the manager’s belief in his players remains as strong as ever.

Dooley insisted: “I believe in them, they all believe in each other and the important thing is to keep it together. But it’s very hard to talk about that this evening. There’s a lot of water to go under the bridge before it’s this time next year.”