Rebel players rediscovered game plan, says Murray

Cork manager Paudie Murray claimed he said "very little" to his team at half-time yesterday, when they were five points down to Kilkenny.

“We didn’t start well, our game plan went out the window so at half-time, all we said was ‘get back to the game-plan and start doing what we’re good at’.

“Kilkenny came with their own plan and probably upset us a small bit but we still didn’t play ours. The game plan was to take the ball on the whole time.

“The problem in the first half was we were hitting the ball aimlessly out of the backs, whereas in the second half we were able to carry it out and our midfield came into it and worked it up the field.”

Murray paid tribute to Jennifer O’Leary. “Based in the North, yeah, she’s given phenomenal commitment, down every second week and every fitness test we’ve done, she’s number one in it, that tells its own story.”

His captain, Anna Geary, echoed Murray: “There were a few people that said things (at half-time), it was the honesty. There’s no point beating around the bush, you have to come out and say what you know is the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts. We knew ourselves we weren’t performing, we were playing too defensively, we weren’t attacking the ball, it wasn’t our ball.

“We were playing them at their game, we had to play our own, we had to come out from the very first whistle of the second half and we did that. We attacked that ball and we started playing like we wanted it.

“That was the reason we came out the right side. It was just that little bit of extra hunger because there was nothing between the teams.”

Geary also paid tribute to the spirit of the players facing adversity away from the field of play.

“That’s the power of sport,” she said, “That it unites people and things like that sometimes drive people on, because you realise how lucky you are to be in this position.

“You realise how lucky you are that you are not going through something that somebody else is going through, and that you have the power, I suppose, to lift someone else up when they’re down.

“And that’s what sport does. It lifts people up. I think everyone today down in Cork has got a little bit of a lift out of this. I really do.”

Kilkenny joint manager Graham Dillon wasn’t blaming the referee for a penalty his side might have won in the last minute: “Whether it was or wasn’t a penalty, you still have to stand up and score it, so we won’t blame it on a penalty. Cork probably showed more intensity in the second half and we failed to match it. You have to credit the girls for fighting to the end and they got in around the square around the end. There were calls for a penalty and things happening, but at the end of the day they weren’t given.”