*Clare manager, Mark Fitzgerald. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill
MISSED CHANCES and an abysmal finish were rued by Clare senior football manager Mark Fitzgerald as the county fell to their third successive loss in the championship.
With twenty minutes remaining in Sunday’s tie, Clare trailed by four points but by the final whistle they were defeated by Tyrone on a margin of fourteen points.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, Fitzgerald expressed his frustration with Clare coughing up opportunities to keep the scoreboard ticking. “Disappointed with the end result, I don’t think it was a 3-15 0-10 game, at one stage we hit the post which would have brought it back to three points and I think that was a killer punch, we missed a couple of real easy frees and ultimately you can’t do that against those teams, Tyrone showed their quality at the end when we were chasing the game”.
When the sides retreated at half-time, they both had five scores each but crucially for Tyrone, two of them were goals, both scored by corner back Niall Devlin. “We weren’t happy to concede goals because the two of them came down the middle but we felt we were getting a bit of joy while still saying we weren’t brilliant up front and around the middle we were struggling a little bit coming out with the ball.
“I wasn’t happy at half time but you were saying it wasn’t the end of the world to be four points down, we tried to adjust a couple of things and see could we remedy it and I thought for a bit we did but you can’t keep missing those set pieces, we only had two or three from seven or nine, you can’t do that against these teams and that is ultimately what happened”.
At the throw-in, Dermot Coughlan was at wing back with Alan Sweeney in the centre forward position and the Doolin man keeping a more forward role than his usual post for large spells.
This was an example of how Clare tried to do things differently but their repeating trend of giving away soft turnovers was evident once again. “Basic turnovers, we spoke about it and we highlighted that Tyrone are very good at turning the ball over. You can tell lads all you want but they have to have the experience of playing at this level, we’ve now played Kerry, Cork and Tyrone, there are some fierce lessons to be learned but lads need to play these games to get these lessons”.
Playing top quality opposition will aid Clare to learn, the Tralee native maintained. “Our last three games have been Kerry, Cork and Tyrone, Tyrone were in the quarter-final of the All-Ireland last year, Kerry were All-Ireland finalists and Cork were in the quarter-final of the All-Ireland, we haven’t met anything like that all year, it will take a while to adjust it, I accept we’re turning the ball over a little bit silly but I think that was part of the way we wanted to play in Division 3 and as you see we’re playing a different way now because we have to, you’d be hoping the lads will learn all the time because they are good lads and you’d be hoping next year will be much better for this squad”.
A final quarter where Clare were outscored 1-9 0-2 was hard to watch, he acknowledged. “I think probably the disappointing thing is we gave up towards the end, that will hurt us and hurt the lads but we’ve a chance to rectify it and get a performance again in two weeks time, as I keep saying you can only learn by living it out and we’re learning a harsh lesson at the moment but that is needed”.
Cork’s win over Donegal means Jim McGuinness’ side will be rearing for road when they meet Clare and fighting for championship survival. Fitzgerald said it was “hard to say” if the Rebels beating Donegal gave Clare extra confidence before the Tyrone clash. “We felt that we only played for thirty five minutes against Cork and only lost by two, we didn’t do ourselves justice and Cork went away and got a good result against Donegal. We won’t give up yet, we’ve two weeks to get ready for Donegal which is a significant challenge and probably bigger because of the result against Cork, they had two weeks to get themselves ready and so do we, Darragh will obviously be a huge loss. We’ll take the learnings from it and see where it leaves us then”.
