Mixed emotions in Kilmurry for Kanturk and Dohenys after draw

With Kanturk the pre-match favourites and Dohenys the side in front entering added time, both camps were unsurprisingly left with mixed emotions following their draw in Kilmurry on Sunday.

For Dohenys it was a second stalemate in two, with manager Niall Hurley less content with a draw from a winning position than he was with the point salvaged from a losing one against Aghabullogue in the opening round.

“It is, it is [mixed emotions]. I was suppose we had a draw as well after Aghabullogue, and I probably was a bit happier with that point,” he began. “This is probably a bit of a disappointment on what could have been, but it's all in our own hands still.

“Ballingeary won today. A win there, and we go through to the quarter-finals. Same for them, it's a great result for them as well. It’s very finely poised. If you told me on the 25th of July that you'd come down to the last game and it's in your own hands, I would have taken it off you.” 

Nonetheless, he was still pleased with the effort the younger crop of players showed against favourites Kanturk.

“I think the junior team last year, we've six of those that we won the Junior B West Cork with last year, six of them played senior today,” he explained. “So that's it, it's about youth coming through. We lost probably our three most senior players during the game.

“We lost Fionn [Herlihy], we lost Eoin [Lavers], we lost Sean Murphy, and the three young fellas that came in gave me everything as well. So look, I'm delighted with the effort.

“They're huge men to be facing,” he said of Kanturk. “When you look at them warming up, it's very intimidating, but we tried to get the ball down to ground and we did, and our lads put their bodies on the line.

“It was kind of a slippy evening, the ball was wet, any bit of contact, any bit of touch at all, the ball will slip out.

“In fairness, the younger lads got in underneath the few big fellas we have. No, the big lads broke it down, the young fellas got in underneath it, that's all I wanted, and they did it to a T.” For Kanturk manager Eoghain O’Connor, there was disappointment in their failure to perform in the second half and the fact they needed a late goal and point to get something from the game, but he was still pleased with the character shown.

“Obviously, we came up here to win the game,” O’Connor said. “We didn't lose a game last year, we qualified with three points. We have three points now, but we know going forward that we'll have to play better to progress in this championship.

“We probably didn't deserve to win with the way we played, to be honest with you,” he admitted. “Saying that, at the end, Cian Clernon did come on at the end and he was a sub and he showed the right attitude to get that point.

“As we know, in the modern game, 15 men will not win you a championship, it's the panel that will win you games, or draw games in this instance!

“Maybe a match at 3.30pm on a Sunday, for us, we don't normally play at 3.30pm on a Sunday. Probably as a management team, we maybe should have looked at that before. It is a different time for a match, but there would be no excuses on the day.”