Kerry punish any mistakes - Power

By Shane Brophy

Tipperary manager David Power says the reset button will have to be pressed after a disappointing 2021 campaign came to an end following defeat to Kerry on Saturday evening.

Four defeats and one win was their lot from their nine-week campaign in the league and championship and while they fell to an eleven point defeat to a powerful Kerry side, Power was happy with his teams’ performance.

“To be fair, I think we worked very hard,” he said.

“The main thing I have been saying for the last couple of weeks is that Kerry are probably more dangerous when we have the ball because if we turn it over they are going to punish us. Their goal came from us ultimately came from us dropping the ball short into the goalkeepers’ hands and they worked the ball up the field and scored a great goal.

“We got punished for those kinds of mistakes and that is the difference between a division four and a division one team, and a team that will be there or thereabouts for the All-Ireland.

“Overall, from where we were at four weeks ago, I am very proud of this bunch. We could have put up the white flag four weeks ago, but we didn’t do that today and kept playing. At times we kept the ball well and could have got a couple of more scores.”

While Tipperary set-up defensively with two sweepers at times, they managed to restrict Kerry for spells, but it meant they were rather blunt at the other end as 1-8 wasn’t going to be enough to win.

“We had a plan,” insisted Power.

“We have a lot of good ball carriers in Kevin Fahey, Bill Maher and Robbie Kiely and our plan was when we turned them over, we would go at them and to be fair we got a penalty that way.”

While 2021 overall was disappointing from the high of late last year, Power feels things are not as bad as recent results indicate and bemoaned the fact of a lack of qualifiers for the team to continue playing for the summer.

“When we are bad we are bad, but when we are good there is no doubt we can play,” Power added.

“Not to have a backdoor in football while there is one in hurling makes no sense. People can argue there are only twelve teams in hurling but surely they could have done with a backdoor in football. “It was great to have the minor and under 20 teams here this evening and we need to be exposing those young lads to playing the likes of Kerry for the promotion of the game.”