Cork City squad and Danny Murphy have a ‘clear the air’ meeting after Bohs loss

CORK CITY Women’s manager Danny Murphy kept his players back in the dressing room for approximately half an hour after their loss to Bohemians last Saturday evening, but it wasn’t to ridicule his squad.

City ended their Women’s National League campaign at Turner’s Cross in a disappointing manner as Abbie Brophy struck the winner for Bohs in the 90th minute.

And while Murphy was ‘frustrated’ by his side’s display and labelled it ‘probably the worst’ during his tenure, he held his players back in the home changing room to clear the air as they look to finish the entire season with a win when they travel to Munster rivals Treaty United on Saturday afternoon.

“It’s frustrating and I wanted to know how they are feeling,” began Murphy.

“What are they feeling on the pitch? Why do they feel we are not getting the best out of each other?

“We spoke it out in the dressing room, keeping them behind was not about having a go at them, we need to understand as well because we want them to get better.

“If I don’t know how they are feeling and how it affects them in the game how can I improve them?

“I just said it to them as well, the most disappointing thing for me was when Bohs players are coming to me afterwards and are like ‘oh, well done, yous have really improved.’

“I’m standing there thinking ‘are you taking the piss?’ Like, we are Cork City Football Club, you should be coming off delighted you got a 1-0 win down here.

It was disappointing. It wasn’t our best performance, even on the ball we weren’t great.

“It’s hard because I don’t think we played our best, we are a better team than that, but I thought we made them look really good.

“We have got to be more consistent in the way we play games. We can’t just be up for games against Shels and then not up for games against…

“I think we just weren’t on it today, we gave the ball away far too easily, we didn’t create anything in the final third, we didn’t really win our individual battles and I just think it wasn’t a good game.

“It was probably the worst we’ve played. It would have been nice to finish on a high, but we are still learning, we are still trying to improve and it’s going to take time to get them to where I want to get them and the level of performance, I want every week.

“We have got to be more consistent in our performance as individuals and then we’ll improve as a group. Other teams don’t seem to make the mistakes we make as often in the game; we make far too many mistakes.”