Downbeat Jimmy Barry-Murphy ‘can’t wait for next year’

“I can’t wait for next year.” Jimmy Barry-Murphy might have said the words but there was little enthusiasm or defiance in his tone when he made the vow.

Speaking to the media, he revealed that he intends seeing out the final year of his two-year extension in this his second spell as manager.

But his delivery seemed to betray the language he was using. “I believe there’s a great future for the Cork players,” he uttered stony-faced. “I’ll leave it at what I said there now.”

Asked before if it was time to reassess his tactical options, Barry-Murphy had shrugged: “We were accused earlier in the year of having no tactics, then we tried a different system of defensive play. Every game you play you try to assess what’s good for the team and the panel of players available to you. As I said, the lads have given us everything over the last four years. We’ve been competing at the highest level but just fallen short.”

And yet he didn’t hold back in reviewing yesterday’s defeat: their best wasn’t good enough.

“In fairness to the players, they tried their hearts out there but we just weren’t good enough. We were comprehensively outplayed all over the field. You just feel that we made a bit of a fight in the second half for a period, but it was a lost cause at times.” Barry-Murphy said there was no indication in the build-up that Cork would be so disappointing. “No, not at all, we played Clare here and won a great game. Clare are a very good team, but today we just fell short of the standard we’d like to set, and Galway were comprehensively better than us all over the field.”