Jim McCorry mystified by Brendan McCardle’s red card

Jim McCorry, couldn’t work it out.

He saw Brendan McArdle receiving a yellow card, but the subsequent red had him flummoxed.

Like so many others in Croke Park, he couldn’t for the life of him remember his defender receiving an earlier yellow.

None of McCorry’s management team could enlighten him.

Neither could Sean Óg McAteer, the long-serving county secretary sat behind him and the type of chap who can be relied on to keep track of the game’s minutiae.

McArdle himself could only shed a modicum of light on it all as he departed the dressing-room later. Yes, he had been shown a yellow card before that, he explained, but he couldn’t be sure when it was or what it had been for.

The phantom yellow card it was, then, or at least until later that evening when word came from Croke Park that the first card had been warranted after just ten minutes for what was deemed to be persistent fouling.

Mystery solved, but McCorry was hardly spitting flames about it anyway.

A Division Two title would have been a nice “bonus”, but the hard yards had been won already in a Division Two campaign that earned a return to the top tier next spring.

This was gravy for both sides, then, even if it curdled like bad milk for Down.

It was a process that began before the first whistle.

“We lost Mark Poland in the warm-up, just before we got into the huddle,” said the Down manager. “It was a bad injury and Mark had to go the hospital. Our thoughts are with him at the moment. It’s more important than winning the game, in the end.

“Mark has been fantastic this year. He has been back to his old self again, deliverer of the ball, sets everything up on that inside left line. Great leader. So, that interrupted us a wee bit.

He actually got struck in his right the eye with the ball full force and we were concerned about the vision.

“The doctors were called in and assessed him straight away and we had to make an adjustment straight away, so that probably upset us a wee bit. Just (in terms of) the balance of the team and the adjustments to what we had tried in training.”

Down coped well enough with that belated blow, but McArdle’s red found them less adaptable.

McCorry juggled his deck at half-time in response, but the tweaks left them more exposed than before what looked to be a harsh second yellow.

“We thought it was soft as well,” he agreed. “We don’t like to criticise referees because they have a hard enough job, but we thought the decisions overall were very, very harsh. We don’t want to cry over spilt milk.

“Roscommon have come up from Division Three and they’ve now won Division Two. They’re well organised and they’ve a good underage group coming through. With or without those decisions (it would have been tough). The game is done and dusted now and we move on.”