Éamonn Fitzmaurice still looking for improvement

Although very evil people throughout history have hardly received as intense a roasting in the afterlife as Cork had to put up with, one thing preyed on Kerry manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice’s mind when the teams went in after the first half.

"Last year we had a big lead at half-time and we didn't keep the scoreboard ticking over, Cork came right back at us and it took a great Brendan Kealy save at the end of the game whereas this year we kept the scoreboard ticking over in the second half.

“That was important and the gap was always too big for Cork to bridge it.”

He was asked was there such a thing as a perfect performance.

“There isn’t,” he replied. “I’m sure when we look back at it there are things we can improve on.

“Look, it’s the first week in July: there is a long way to go yet in the season and the serious stuff starts now in terms of knockout.

“We’re going to Croke Park, where we want to be, in four weeks’ time. It’s a long enough gap again to get over. The lads have county championship next weekend, which is a distraction.

“Hopefully fellas will come through it injury-free because the last couple of rounds of the county championship haven’t been too good for us injury-wise.”

Injury story

So far Fitzmaurice’s team have survived the worst injury story of them all – that is keeping

Colm Cooper

out for the season.

In the absence of the maestro, James O’Donoghue, a rookie All Star last year, continued on his dauntless way, shooting 10 points, all but two from play.

O’Donoghue accepted that the crushing win had laid down a marker.

“It is a statement, but there are always new fellas coming on in Kerry. We have lost a couple of players, but all is not over. We have some very good players coming through and they stood up today thank God.”

For Cork manager Brian Cuthbert a season that had been promising much up until around half-time in the league semi-final against Dublin, now lies in pieces – not beyond salvage but requiring as much restoration work as the stadium.

“I don’t know what happened to be honest. We started well enough, got three points and were doing okay. Next thing, Kerry take over, started dominating the breaks and played from there. Certainly, going in at half-time we’d left ourselves a huge mountain to climb again, something we didn’t want to do but we did.

‘Intensity’

“I suppose it’s very easy to say intensity and effort and all of those kinds of things but Kerry were much better than us today. Hats off to them.

“Everything is on the table for review. We’ll just have to go back and look at everything and see where we go from here.

“We enter a new competition, we haven’t won this competition. We dust ourselves off and go again – that’s the nature of this thing.

“But we’re hugely disappointed that we’ve left a huge amount of people down, especially ourselves.

“At times there today it must have been very difficult for the Cork supporters because that wasn’t our intention going out there. We looked a yard off and they turned us over quite easily and we found it very difficult to turn them over so, certainly, they looked sharper than us, definitely.”