CLARE SENIOR football manager, Colm Collins has said they can have “no complaints” with their exit from the Munster SFC.
Despite holding the favourites tag for their provincial quarter-final with Limerick, Clare lost out to Billy Lee’s side after extra time and a penalty shootout.
Injuries prevented Keelan Sexton, Cathal O’Connor, Stephen Ryan and Darragh Bohannon from lining out while during the contest full-back Cillian Brennan and Podge Collins were forced off prematurely.
Absent players was not going to be an excuse used by Collins for their disappointing loss. “We have a fine group of players training every night, if somebody gets injured it is next man up and that is it. If you can’t handle a couple of injuries, you are going nowhere, I thought fellas on the pitch did themselves proud and did everything they could, on the night the chances we missed in ordinary time were costly, then fair play to Limerick, when it came to penalties they really were on a different league”.
Seeing players hobble off and their unavailability is “part and parcel” of the game, the Kilmihil native said. “You don’t be training a large group of players if you’re not prepared to play them, that’s the way it is”.
Collins told The Clare Echo that Clare did not practice penalties in advance of the game. Limerick scored all four of their spot kicks while Joe McGann was the only Banner player to convert as Cian O’Dea and Conor Jordan both missed the target. “Even if we had our penalty takers were off the pitch when it came to extra time, that was the killing thing, in a normal run of events the key penalty takers would have been Tubs, Keelan and Gavin, they were all off the pitch. The Limerick penalty taking was top drawer”.
“We had all the opportunities to win the game in normal time and we didn’t, we can’t have any complaints”.
He disagreed that aspects of Clare’s first half showing was flat. “I wouldn’t say the first half, we started really well and played really well for the first ten or fifteen minutes, then we let it drop a bit in the first half but came back in the second half and played really well, we got the chances but didn’t convert them”.
