IN THE end it was all just a bit of housekeeping for Cork, although Conor Counihan is far too well-mannered to allow such an impression to form unchallenged.

“There were long periods of that game where there was very little in it,” he said afterwards. “The goal brought it back to two. At any point when there is five or six points in it and someone gets a goal, a bit of momentum, you are under pressure. I would never really have sat comfortable with it.”

Yet comfortable is what they were, if everyone is honest about it. Played in front of a vast and echoey stadium, it was hard to get away from the challenge-match atmosphere. Counihan conceded that there wasn’t very much by the way of championship fare on show.

“I got the sense the first half was a bit dead in that no team got up to the intensity and maybe the crowd was a factor in that. There was a bit of excitement in the stadium obviously with the previous game having gone down to the wire and that so maybe it’s difficult to come back into that.”

For James McCartan, the sight of a Cork team galloping off into the distance is becoming a wearingly familiar one. He knows his team aren’t on the same level as Counihan’s – the massed ranks of his players dropping back into his defence yesterday seemed to admit as much. It wouldn’t usually be the Down style but they had a go at it and it kept Cork within reach for much of the game. But the goals cost them.

“We tried something a bit different to see would it get us something. Anytime we got it back to two, they seemed to get it back to three. We are bitterly disappointed with the human error which we introduced into the game in the last 20 minutes. That cost us both goals. Once they went in the game was up.

“For 50 minutes of the game, I felt that Cork – I am not going to say they were there for the taking, but they weren’t tearing it up.

“We felt that if we could have upped it a wee bit and got more early ball into our forward line, that we could have caused them problems. Sitting here now, on reflection, it seems that human error played a big part in our downfall.”