ONE OF these days Kieran McGeeney might surprise us all and come bounding out of the Kildare dressing room smiling and laughing – but for now he remains the king of understatement, the model of restraint.
“Happy enough with the performance,” says the Kildare manager, not once stepping out of character. “It’s nice to get some silverware, even though some of ye were looking for it more than us, at one stage there.
“But to be talking about the main part of the summer, in late spring, is a dangerous thing. We’re not going to be measured until the summer, no matter what we do here. Tyrone are one of the form teams at the moment, but we dug in, really kept at it, and had some courage to take the big shots.”
No matter how hard we try, McGeeney isn’t going to raise a smile – and keeps to the point that summer is where Kildare will ultimately be measured.
“Everybody wants silverware,” he says, “but that pressure was external, more than internal. Every team wants to win as many competitions as they can, but there is some priority there as well. Everyone wants to win in the summer, but they’ll enjoy this, tonight anyway. But that will only last until the next game.”
Mickey Harte is typically frank in his appraisal too of both his own team and of Kildare – beginning with what it means to lose for the first time in 2012.
“It’s always a setback when you lose, of course. But you know a winning streak doesn’t go on forever. It does come to an end some time. I’d prefer it wouldn’t come to an end out there of course, but we now face the Ulster championship, that’s the next competition we have to get ready for, and maybe that experience will serve us well as we go into the Ulster championship.
“I wouldn’t have chose it as a way of going in there to the summer. But it’s better now that we’re promoted and it doesn’t impact on that.”
Harte doesn’t try to disguise why Kildare won and Tyrone did not – and no one could argue with it either: “It’s a very simple thing,” he says. “One team was better than the other, and Kildare were that team today. Despite the fact that we had a decent breeze, they were very much in the game in the first half – obviously a point ahead at half-time. But they were bossing us in the first half in particular.
“I think maybe for 20 minutes or so in the second half we grabbed a hold of the game and maybe with only 10 or 12 minutes to go it was a level game – and it could have gone either way at that stage but they just stepped up another gear in the last 10 minutes and really overwhelmed us. Their finishing was excellent when it needed to be.
“I suppose that’s the best time to play your best football, when it’s getting you across the line. You’ll always look at these things and say, ‘Were we bad?’ But I think that would be doing a disservice to Kildare, because the way they applied themselves to the game meant they got the result that they did.
“You have to hold your hands up. Yes, on reflection, we weren’t as good as we have been in a number of games but, you know, what causes the other? Who knows? Or what percentage can you weight on one thing over the other? But the ultimate thing was that we probably didn’t play as well as we have done in many games this year – but Kildare certainly were just a better team today.”
