Counihan not happy with second half

Conor Counihan had just seen his Cork side win a Munster title by a double-digit margin, but he wasn’t too happy.

The Cork manager said he’d wanted a performance, but he was clearly disappointed with his players’ second-half display.

“Goals were important – we were fortunate to get a few. Clare had opportunities as well probably in the second-half and didn’t take them,” he said.

“We’d have been disappointed with the second-half. We think Clare probably won the second-half and we didn’t push on enough. We had the comfort of a couple of goals of a lead and we didn’t build on it.

“We made some basic errors and against a team that would finish better, we’d have been in trouble.”

Cork were only awarded one free in the first-half but Counihan wasn’t making much of that — “Maybe that was more [how] the game went. The referee left it flow a fair bit – that was the way.”

“We had a very disrupted campaign coming into this with injuries and players not there. It certainly wasn’t easy but hopefully we’ll get a bit of a clearer run at this stage now.”

Cork made two changes before the start, withdrawing Pa Kelly and Graham Canty with “niggles”, as Counihan described them.

The Aghada clubman acknowledged the positives in Cork’s display: “We kicked some good scores – the goals we got were pretty clinical.

“We were unlucky for one or two more maybe – goals were important. Some of our defending was reasonable, more of it lackadaisical.

“We’ve all seen big days like that. You get a ball in a particular time and you get a split second to do the right thing and the chance is gone.

“We can’t be too negative about it. We’ve won a Munster championship for the first time in three years. That’s good enough. The second-half performance would be very disappointing. But we’re in an All-Ireland quarter-final and we’ll work on that now.”

Still, the Cork boss reiterated his desire for a better performance from his side before heading to the dressing-room: “It isn’t about a result, it’s about a performance and the performance wasn’t good enough.

“We’ll sit down and analyse it again, as we do with every game. The second-half would have been disappointing.

“Bit more urgency about it [needed]… maybe the fact that we had a three-goal cushion, you take your leg off the pedal but at this level, that’s not good enough.

“You need to be looking over the line and you need to be saying to yourself, am I doing enough to keep myself on the next day? Fellas have put themselves under question now.

“At this level you expect and demand more of players. We’ll be asking the questions of our fellas over the next number of weeks, why we didn’t push on? The reality is that we’re preparing now for an All-Ireland quarter-final and we have to up the ante on that.”