Cork v Westmeath: Pat Ryan disappointed with Rebels' display

Despite Cork’s win over Westmeath, manager Pat Ryan felt that the performance left a lot to be desired.

Leading by seven points at half-time, Cork pushed nine ahead early in the second half but were brought back to five as Westmeath rallied.

Six points separated the sides at the end but, despite registering a third straight win, Ryan wasn’t overly pleased.

“I wasn’t that happy with it, to be honest,” he said.

“We started well enough in the first ten, 15 minutes. We raced into a big lead, played some good hurling and we were eight or nine points up at one stage.

“We just got sloppy then after that – played slow, moved the ball slow, too many passes around the middle and didn’t hit the inside line, didn’t work hard enough and so that was disappointing.

“But look, we’re three games in and we’re not in too bad of a position. 

We’d have taken that position if we were offered it five or six weeks ago.

“In fairness to Westmeath, they played some fantastic hurling.

“They moved the ball well and they had a good system that they used very well and stuck to it. Obviously, Killian Doyle is a good player, he got into good positions and we couldn’t get our hands on him at times and he got a couple of very good scores.

“From our own point of view, we had some fellas making their debuts today and we were giving game-time to fellas that were just coming back, so there was rust in those fellas and it just shows you have to be three or four weeks back into training before you play any kind of competitive game.

“We got good game-time into fellas but we’re disappointed overall with the performance.”

Given that Cork had won their opening two matches while Westmeath had lost theirs, Ryan felt that there have been an element of complacency.

“We’ve been priding ourselves on fellas working for the team,” he said.

“When you’re coming down and you’re playing Westmeath and you’ve fellas saying that you’ll win handy, I think in fellas’ own heads they want to get a couple of scores and impress and get up the pecking order of the squad going forward.

“We didn’t work hard enough for most of the game, to be honest, but we’ll move on to Tuesday night.”

There were some bright spots, though.

“I thought that Cormac O’Brien played very well at right half-back, to be honest,” Ryan said.

Lots of fellas played well enough but I just didn’t think we attacked the ball hard enough.

“We didn’t go to the ball enough, we left other fellas make decisions for us. In fairness to Westmeath, they put us under good pressure coming out with the ball.

“There are a lot of learnings there for us and it gives us a lot of fodder when we go back to training on Tuesday for what we need to be doing.

“Whoever you’re playing at this level, you need to have intensity and urgency and I don’t think that we had enough of that. We were making three or four passes around the middle before moving the ball in, something we hadn’t been doing all year, and I think fellas went back to type a small bit.”

FRUSTRATING

Ger Millerick was making his first appearance of the year for Cork but he went off at half-time. Thankfully, Ryan revealed that it was not a serious injury.

“Ger just had a bit of a tight hamstring,” he said. “He had been playing a lot of games with UCC so we just took him off as a precaution. That was his first game with us, he hasn’t been involved – we left Ger alone with UCC all along.

“We were anxious to get him back in but disappointed that he had to go off.”