Failing to close out game still rankles

THERE ARE some things about losing the All-Ireland football final he’s still clearly coming to terms with, and indeed might never understand, and it probably doesn’t help that Kerry supporters can be so unforgiving.

But even if Colm “Gooch” Cooper could be excused for hiding away and feeling sorry for himself that’s simply not his style – the Kerry captain has always been one of the familiar faces of the AIB club championship and knows that competition might at least offer some short-term redemption for what happened in Croke Park on the third Sunday in September.

Truth is, the Gooch obviously hasn’t found too much consolation around Kerry, not that he’s necessarily looking for it. “Still very disappointing, of course, yeah,” he says, “and a case, sometimes, of you saying to yourself ‘what happened in that five or six minutes of madness?’

“As ye know in Kerry the bar is so high that if you don’t win it every year there is going to be questions asked, of players’ quality, players’ appetite, management.

“And everyone has their reasons why Kerry lost. Why wasn’t this guy moved? Or why didn’t this guy kick this? They are the questions that are always asked. We will draw up our own conclusions on how or why we lost the game and see if we can learn from them.”

So, even at this still relatively early stage, why does the Gooch think Kerry lost? “Well, knowing that we just couldn’t close out the game, that’s the most disappointing thing, from my point of view. I can’t ever think of a game where we were four or five points up with six minutes to go and weren’t able to close out the game.

“Usually that’s one of our stronger points. It’s just disappointing we’ve done it so many times in the past and we knew we were capable of doing it but why it didn’t happen or whatever, that’s disappointing.

“It doesn’t matter about me receiving Sam Maguire, or who is captain, we’re disappointed for each other as a group that we weren’t able to close it out. Unfortunately we lost by a point. The few players I’ve talked to since we’ve kind of said, like, ‘we just made mistakes that we usually never would’.

“But we’ll look at the DVD and see what we can learn from it. Sometimes it is tough viewing but if you want to come back next year and you want to learn from things you are going to have to take a little bit of pain.”

It’s no consolation either that Kerry’s three defeats throughout 2011 were all by a single point, yet the Gooch at least sees some positives in that. “I suppose at the start of the year, looking at the team, it’s changed around a bit, with a new midfield, a couple of new guys coming in, Shane Enright’s played, a couple of younger guys, Kieran O’Leary has come in, different stages, so you’ve introduced a lot of players and lost an All-Ireland by a point.

“If you look at it that way it’s not completely all doom and gloom either. It’s just sport, you win and you lose sometimes. Get on from it and learn from it.”

While Dublin’s late goal from Kevin McManamon unquestionably swung the game in their favour, Kerry hadn’t entirely ruled it out, or at least the Gooch reckons they’d always known the potential for the Dublin substitutes to inflict damage.

“You can prepare for a lot of things, but when there is 65 minutes gone in a championship game in Croke Park and you are trying to chase down a guy who is fresh in it’s hard to do. In any game if someone gets a goal with five minutes to go it gives them huge momentum. Particularly a team like Dublin and in Croke Park, and it’s very hard to stem that.

“When the goal went in they went up a point and in fairness, Star (Kieran Donaghy) kicked a great point to level it. I thought we could be looking at a replay then, but, in fairness, Dublin had a phenomenal work-rate. I’d say they turned us over quite a lot in the last four or five minutes even. That’s disappointing because we are usually better than that.

“But you couldn’t blame any one individual for anything. We just felt we are usually better than that. That’s probably the most disappointing fact.”

One person the Gooch definitely isn’t blaming is the referee: “I didn’t think the referee beat us, to be fair. Every game there are debatable decisions . . . is it a free or not a free. I don’t think that is a free. We wouldn’t be cribbing about that. Maybe one or two frees that we might have felt we should have got, but that would be about it.”

So, with Jack O’Connor definitely staying for another year, the only other question for now is how the Gooch feels Kerry will react in 2012? “Well, it won’t be easy to get back to the position we were in, because any time you are in an All-Ireland final you have to play well to get there. But I think we have introduced new players, and have guys emerging as leaders. I am taking that to say that guys will be better next year. We’ll have to be. If we stand still we will be passed out again. But we feel that we can take positives from this year.”