THE FIRST WORD out of Peter Keane’s mouth in his post-match review summed it up.
“Sickener.”
It couldn’t be put any other way by the Kerry manager.
A gut-wrenching conclusion for his team in yesterday’s Munster semi-final. They had one foot in the decider in a fortnight’s time only for the qualification to be prised away from them when Mark Keane booted home that dramatic late goal for Cork.
The Kingdom boss reflected on a day when they could never quite kill off the challenge of their opponents.
“We weren’t getting away from them but we were keeping our noses ahead, a point or two point lead (means) a goal is always a concern, I think we had been doing quite well up to that in not allowing them goal chances, of course it’s a precarious lead.
“Scoreboard doesn’t lie, hanging in there, it took us a long time to get ahead, we just weren’t putting them away.”
Kerry began at a decent tempo but that did not translate to the scoreboard.
“Our decision making was poor,” admitted Keane.
“We were creating chances, we just weren’t taking them. Early on the first quarter we opened them up in the first quarter but we didn’t take them. Maybe sometimes you get stuck in a hole instead of kicking on.
“Like I said, the conditions were the same for both teams. We just weren’t pushing on. There were scoring opportunities, so 13 from 30, that speaks for itself.”
Kerry lost two players, Ronan Buckley and David Moran, to black cards during the second half of normal time.
“I probably thought it was harsh [the second one], just from my recollect of the time,” stated Keane. There was a bit of a physicality going on. I thought he had been put out of the game just before that. It happens, you just got to get on with it.”
The loss is a hugely damaging moment for a Kerry team that looked to be travelling on an upward curve.
Taking Dublin to the All-Ireland final replay last year and then winning the league title recently seemed to suggest they were set for an extended campaign.
But this exit means they are forced to reset and reassess, waiting for the 2021 action to resume once more.
“I said last year after we lost the All-Ireland you are starting at the bottom of a greasy pole again and we are stuck at the bottom of that greasy pole now again.
“It would have been lovely to have pushed on and progressed, but we didn’t, so we just got to go away and relook at it.”
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