National League Premier Div/Shelbourne 2 Cork City 2: Substitute Thomas Morgan scored a dramatic late equaliser at Tolka Park last night to keep Shelbourne three points ahead of closest rivals Waterford.
Shelbourne made two changes from the side that beat Dublin City last Friday night, with captain Owen Heary and former Cork City player Ollie Cahill coming back into the side.
Cork, meanwhile, kept faith with same starting 11 that defeated St Patrick's Athletic and in the opening stages it certainly looked as if continuity on the Leesiders part was going to serve them well.
City started the much brighter and could have taken the lead as early as the 34th second, when Michael Nwankwo picked out Neale Fenn in space, but the former Spurs striker failed to threaten as Steve Williams saved comfortably.
Cork took the lead in the 19th minute. George O'Callaghan started the move with a 70-yard cross-field ball that turned defence into attack.
Fenn was the recipient of the pass and he then fed John O'Flynn who turned his marker, Dave Rogers, before curling a 25-yard effort beyond Williams.
The pace of the City strike force continued to cause the Shelbourne defence problems, and Fenn should have doubled Cork's advantage when he beat the offside trap in the 28th minute, but yet again disappointed with his finish, as he scuffed his shot left and wide.
Shelbourne were gifted their way back into the game seven minutes before the interval when Alan Bennett clumsily brought down Glen Fitzpatrick in the area; nobody was surprised to see the league's top scorer Jason Byrne step up to take the spot kick, and almost inevitably the Irish international buried it for his 12th goal of the season.
Byrne then almost got his fifth goal in two games with a curling free-kick from 25 yards out just three minutes later, but Michael Devine did well to push his effort away.
The champions must have felt the tide was beginning to turn in their favour, but were handed a major blow just moments before half-time when Byrne was forced to hobble off with a hamstring injury.
In Byrne's absence, Glen Fitzpatrick began to make his presence felt on the champions' front line alongside Byrne's replacement Gerard Rowe.
It was Fitzpatrick who set up the first real chance of the second-half, as he slipped a pass through for the onrushing Ger McCarthy, but once again Devine was well placed to parry McCarthy's powerful strike wide.
Cork, meanwhile, had lost some of the zest of the first half, but O'Callaghan was still doing his best to make things happen in midfield.
The visitors also suffered a major injury setback of their own when striker and goalscorer O'Flynn had to exit with an injury of his own on 67 minutes.
Nevertheless, that still left Cork with Fenn, and the man so often seen as O'Flynn's understudy, looked to have grabbed the headlines for himself with another beautiful long-range effort 12 minutes from time, which more than made up for his previous misses.
However, it was the understudy at the other end of the pitch who would prove to be Shels saviour, with Glen Fitzpatrick doing all the hard work to set up Thomas Morgan for Shels last-gasp equaliser.
Fitzpatrick then nearly scored the winner for Shelbourne in stoppage time but Devine was on hand to save the visitors.
SHELBOURNE: Williams; Heary, Harris, Rogers, Crawley; McCarthy, Hoolahan, S Byrne, Cahill (Morgan, 79 mins); J Byrne (Rowe, 45 mins), Fitzpatrick.
CORK CITY: Devine; O'Halloran, Bennett, Murray, Murphy; Woods, O'Brien, O'Callaghan, Nwankwo (Kearney, 86 mins); Fenn, Offline (Doyle, 67 mins).
Referee: E Barr (Dublin).
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