Ryan stands by his players

PLENTY of talking points from Jason Ryan but Joe McQuillan’s call not to give Ciarán Lyng a penalty when he was fouled so close to the parallelogram by Michael Fitzsimons topped them all.

“We thought it was (a penalty) from the angle I was looking at it but I’m sure it will be pointed out fairly clearly on TV whether it was or it wasn’t,” he said.

“I thought Joe made some excellent decisions in the game and I’d have no real qualms with it. He’s an excellent referee.

“I suppose our players’ reaction said it all; there weren’t too many of them jumping up and down. It must have been outside.”

Ryan was never going to do a Tommy Lyons and blame his keeper for the defeat. Anthony Masterson was inconsolable after the game although the Wexford manager attempted to reassure him afterwards he wasn’t to blame for the defeat.

But the Castletown man did make a mess of Tomás Quinn’s speculative kick, pushing it into Graham Molloy’s way and the ball ricocheted back and into the net.

“These things happen,” shrugged Ryan. “There was nobody at fault. You could say the same thing with James McCarthy’s goal, that it was a terrible goal conceded when you’ve a wing back making his way up the field and being able to rocket it into the back of the net.

“You can’t blame the goalkeeper, there’s no one person at fault. That’s the way we were trying to play because we were swapping and changing in different ways.

“That guy (Masterson) lives for football. If it was Stephen Cluxton’s second Leinster final and he conceded two goals and he took it very personally, maybe he’d get equally upset.

“He is an emotional guy, he conceded goals and he just showed his emotions. Fair dues to him for being so open about it rather than hiding around a corner and doing it.”

It was a turning point in the game but Ryan believed Alan Brogan’s score shortly after it was more of a killer.

“Dublin have a habit of getting a goal and then getting the next point or the next scores because the goal hits you and then when you’re down you get a kick in the gonads. That didn’t help.”

Ryan is adamant his men will be right for their All-Ireland fourth round SFC qualifier.

“Yeah. I don’t have to think about it, they will be easy to lift, they will be right. In two weeks’ time, they will be fine, they will play better than they did today. No doubt.”

However, he had a slight dig at the county board’s plans to go ahead with hurling fixtures later this week.

“If we had only one week after this it would be hard but two thirds or three quarters of the panel will be playing hurling on Thursday or Friday night. That’s their preparation for the qualifiers.”

Asked if he was upset with that, Ryan replied: “Read into it anyway you want.”

Ryan also defended Wexford’s tactics after deploying captain David Murphy as a sweeper for the first half although the defender appeared to be marking more after the break.

“We were 15 on 15 the whole way through,” he insisted. “We played the same way in the second half as we did in the first half, there were no changes tactically. We felt it would be good enough to beat Dublin and at half-time we still felt it was the right way to go at them. There were certain positional changes, we rotated certain guys but that was it.”