The tenor of the game with Mickey Harte’s men was ‘more or less what we expected’ the Kerry boss said
Kerry manager Jack O’Connor celebrates after the GAA Football All-Ireland Senior Championship quarter-final match between Kerry and Derry at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Kerry boss Jack O’Connor hailed the impact of his second half substitutions in helping seal victory in what he described as an ‘energy sapping’ contest with Derry.
The Kingdom, who ran out five-point winners over the Oak Leaf county in what was a fairly underwhelming spectacle in Croke Park, battled their way past an at times extremely dogged Derry combination.
Speaking post match, the Dromid man had an air of quiet satisfaction about him. More so with the result than the performance, we suspect, although even there he seemed pleased with how his men thought and fought their way around Mickey Harte’s men.
“A real tough battle,” is how he summed it up.
“More or less what we expected, probably wasn’t a game for the purists, because it was defensive, but we’re happy to play the game on whatever terms we come across and Derry set the terms early on.
“They got a rake of men back and made it hard for us to find space and I just thought we were playing around the periphery in the first half and in the second half we made an agreement at half-time that we’d go at the game a bit more aggressively and I thought we started to find pockets in the second half and find a bit more intensity and a bit more energy.
“Yeah, I’d agree with that [Kerry’s tempo was sluggish and slow in the first half]. We addressed that at half-time and felt that we were going to have to play with more energy and get more bodies ahead of the ball just to test Derry’s defence a bit.
“The first half it was a bit too easy for them and we weren’t just committing enough bodies. We were playing everything in front of them, I thought we got runners going through the lines and those pop passes inside with runners coming off we got that going a lot better in the second half.
“So I agree with you that game was being fairly played on Derry’s terms in the first half.”
Kerry really kicked on in the last fifteen to twenty minutes of the game with subs such as Killian Spillane, Cillian Burke and Dylan Geaney impacting significantly.
“Look, that’s a tough game to play in when you’re playing that kind of a game you have to run 100 yards back after turning over the ball that’s energy sapping, that’s a lot of running,” he explained.
“We were fairly sure that fellas were going to struggle after fifty minutes so it was important that we got energy off the bench and those boys you mentioned there certainly gave us that.”
The Kingdom are now through to an All Ireland semi-final with Armagh in two weeks’ time.
