TYRONE captain Seán Cavanagh said “fair play” to Kerry for their clinical finishing – but argued that was denied to his team by the match officials.
The Red Hands were just a point behind with five minutes to go when they were denied what would have been a second penalty, with substitute Pádraig McNulty instead booked for ‘feigning a foul’.
The Moy man was convinced a second spot kick should have been awarded, five minutes after Peter Harte had netted one, saying: “Yeah, I was five feet from it and it’s just so hard to take. You don’t want to be a sore loser but you would wonder if that was at the other end of the field whether that same decision would have happened.”
Cavanagh suggested that all the criticism and controversy over his team-mate Tiernán McCann’s late dive against Monaghan in the All-Ireland quarter-final may have contributed to that call, commenting: “Obviously, there’s been an awful lot of negativity around this team and it’s not for me to say just whether that’s been fairly or unfairly, but all we’re looking for is fair play and it was very hard to take.
“I think a couple of the frees they got at the other end of the field, big Paudie [McNulty] had no real reason to go to ground, he was cutting inside his man, looking to get a goal at that stage. It’s hard to take. He feels himself it should have been a penalty, I thought it was. On further review, it might be a different story.”
Cavanagh acknowledged Tyrone could have done more to help their own cause, having missed several goal chances and some long range frees, stating: “Yeah. Good teams, whenever those chances present themselves, normally will nail those.
“Possibly that’s down to a wee bit of inexperience – you need that bit of guile to take that extra step or make that extra pass. It’s luck too, there’s no other way of dressing it up – sometimes those things will work for you and today they just didn’t when we needed them to.
“[It was a] heroic effort, nobody tried as hard as we did out there, but we just felt that we’ve left a wee bit behind here today… It’s gutting to take, I thought we possibly deserved more. Fair play to Kerry, when the chips were down they seemed to get their scores a wee bit easier than we were getting them.
“We felt there was more in us, we felt we left it behind us here today. There are days when you go out and you truly believe you couldn’t have won the game – but today isn’t one of those days.
“We felt certain things just didn’t break for us and another day we’d be sitting in an All-Ireland final. That’s a gut-wrenching thing, but that’s the fact of the matter.”
Asked if he hopes Mickey Harte will continue as manager next year, for a 14th season in charge of the Tyrone seniors, Cavanagh replied: “I think we all would. It wasn’t Mickey Harte that pulled a few shots or maybe didn’t make the extra pass, it was ourselves… “Mickey, ‘Horse’ [Gavin Devlin], and Peter [Donnelly] have been a fantastic management team this year. No one in Tyrone can hold that against them because they’ve done everything they can. We felt there was enough there to get to the final and win it, but it just wasn’t to be.”
As for himself, Cavanagh is undecided whether he will be back for a 15th senior campaign: “It’s hard to know, it’s just so difficult at this stage. You have to look at it every year and it’s getting tougher to look at it. I don’t know, I’ll contemplate in the winter and see how it goes from there.”
However, he was more certain about a brighter future for many of his team-mates on this Tyrone team, concluding: “There’ve been great young players over the last couple of years in Tyrone; I think we’ve an average age of 24, something like that, which says all you need to know.
“There’s a great crop of players coming through, you could see that from the [under]21s this year. They’ll be there, they’ll be back. It’s just hard because I just felt there’s another level, there’s another 10 per cent there that on another day if it had have come out we could have gone the whole way this year.
“It’s hard but, look, it’s a lesson to be learned. It’ll be a tough lesson. It doesn’t seem like it right now, but there’ll be other days.”
As for Sunday, though, Cavanagh felt Tyrone were set to win this semi-final after Peter Harte’s penalty, but Kerry got four more scores to just one by the Red Hands:
“Yeah, I genuinely believed that we would push on then, but they seemed to get themselves into scoring positions easier than we were doing.
“You have to give credit for that, good teams will do that, they seemed to be able to chip off points and sneak in behind when things were opening up. But we had chances, and that’s the fine lines, that’s the inches, that’s the margins.”
