STEPHEN KENNY ACCEPTED that St Patrick’s Athletic lacked the quality required against Shelbourne and felt his side were half a yard off the pace at times in their 1-0 defeat at Richmond Park on Friday.

The Saints boss acknowledged the quality of Daniel Kelly’s winning goal late on for the visitors but couldn’t contain his frustration at the “crazy” circumstances that led to Sean Hoare’s red card as the home side went in search of an equaliser in stoppage time.

Kenny felt Shelbourne players crossed the line with manhandling from set pieces throughout the game and highlighted midfielder JJ Lunney as a repeat offender.

However, the nature of Hoare’s second yellow card as he sought to wrestle free in the box at a corner left Kenny aghast, describing referee Rob Hennessy’s handling of the situation as “a nonsense”, “nowhere near acceptable” and “a failure to deal with situation.”

Hoare will now be suspended for the trip to Derry City and Kenny, whose side remain second in the table, didn’t hold back in his assessment.

“The two or three corner kicks when Sean Hoare was wrestled to the ground, I just watched the video back, absolutely wrestled, rugby tackled to the ground. In the one before they both got yellows and then the next one the referee decides to give him a yellow, but waits 10 seconds and doesn’t realise he was booked already. So it’s a crazy decision. I think we actually should have had three penalties for that in the box there,” Kenny said.

“They (Shelbourne) have conceded a lot of goals from sets (set-pieces) and probably they’ve taken a different approach where they’ve actually just manhandled people in the box. Sean [Hoare] was sent off so we don’t have him for the end of the game, where we hit the bar at the end, and we’re putting them under pressure.

“You can’t just send people off like that for that. You know what I mean? Because he’s been manhandled, he’s trying to attack the ball so he actually gets the second yellow, crazy, absolutely crazy. It’s not acceptable, really, to be honest with you, that’s absolutely 100% nowhere near acceptable.

“It’s a failure to deal with the issue at hand, which is the fact that the Shelbourne players are pulling down the St Pat’s players in the box. So it’s a fudge then to give two yellows. It’s an absolute fudge.

“The sending off is just a nonsense. Just a nonsense. And if you’re going to do it right, there are penalties. You can’t just haul people and drag them down. You can’t do that.”

Despite this frustration, Kenny was not shying away from the shortcomings of the home side as they failed to capitalise on Shamrock Rovers slipping up away to Dundalk.

“Overall, from our point of view, we didn’t play as well as we have been playing. Shelbourne started the second half better than we did and had periods of ascendancy in that period. We were half a yard off it, I felt, in that period. Our passing overall wasn’t good enough and consistent enough.

“Just that level of creativity that we’ve had, we didn’t quite find it, but we still easily did enough to draw the game. Obviously, Luke [Turner] hit the bar at the end. Not every game you’ve got to play to your best, so we needed to dig it out. We needed to dig it out.

“We had periods where we were on top. Shels had periods where they were on top. So I’m not sitting here saying we deserve to win the game. [It was] careless from us to lose it.”