Pat Ryan never found a bush worth beating around. Cork came to win the All-Ireland, led by six points at the break and got blitzed by 21 in the second half. No ifs or ands or pots or pans about it.
“We just got outworked really, to be honest,” he said. “They got great momentum behind themselves, got a few scores and got the crowd behind them. They got a couple of breaks of the ball with a couple of the goals they got and then obviously the sending-off.
“Look, credit to Tipperary. They came out and worked really, really hard. We were in a good position at half-time but we got blown away in the second half.”
Then he corrected himself. He didn’t like that mention of a couple of breaks that might have gone Tipperary’s way when it was quoted back to him in the next question.
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“It’s wrong to say luck because it was a lot of good play by Tipperary that won that game. Luck had absolutely nothing to do with it. Look, the harder you work, the more breaks that come for you and the more balls that fall into your hands.
“In fairness, they worked really, really hard, used the ball really, really well and put us under pressure on our own puck-out, especially in the second half. And put us under big pressure on their puck-out in the second half as well. Credit to Tipperary. It’s disappointing for our fellas.”
Disappointing isn’t the half of it. Any team can lose an All-Ireland final but to fizzle out of one so badly is going to stick in their guts for the winter. Cork have now lost three finals in the space of five seasons, two of them by cricket scores. That’s going to take a lot of getting over.
“Our momentum and our energy was terrible in the second half,” admitted Ryan. “They had all the momentum, they had all the energy, they were the crowd that were working the hardest. That’s the disappointing thing from our point of view.
“Obviously it’s the second All-Ireland in a row that we’ve lost. Just really, really disappointed with that second half. We didn’t represent ourselves the way we should have represented ourselves. Credit to Tipperary. They came up and you could see that they had loads of momentum behind them and they had a lot of good players all over the place.”
