Kilcoyne disappointed by Knockmore’s senior county final no-show

MEN in saffron and blue poured into the dressing room sullen and shell-shocked while their neighbours were on a different planet a few feet away.

Thousand-yard stares shot from glistening, distraught eyes as some of the hardest men in Mayo club football were reduced to tears by a defeat that will tear at them for months - and maybe even years to come.

Aidan Kilcoyne wasn’t the worst of them, but certainly not the best.

“It’s really difficult to put your finger on it right now. We were flat, for 20 minutes we just never got going,” Kilcoyne said after the game.

“It’s very difficult right now to figure out why. I thought we prepared really well, they had a game plan and Ballina came out and they squeezed us and they put big pressure on our kick-out and squeezed us up high and we just didn’t have the energy or the pace coming out from the back to break out and made it really difficult for ourselves.

“I felt when we did get up the pitch we caused them problems up front,” he added, scraping the barrel for positives. “We opened them up at times, but then our finishing; three dropped short. Things like that. We just didn’t do enough. That’s the end of it.”

In any case, Ballina’s start was so good that Kilcoyne, John Brogan, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t conjure a plan to overturn the six-point half-time deficit.

“We made a few positional switches. We changed our midfield, we used Connell [Dempsey] and Ollie [Armstrong] to wing-forward to give us more of an option for kick-outs to see could we get further up the pitch,” Kilcoyne explained.

“At the end of the day, the second half was a bit more competitive. Ballina were always able to keep us at arms’ length. We probably needed to get a goal early in the second half and they managed the game out really well.”

Knockmore had tried in vain to get clearance for the suspended Pearse Ruttledge - one player who definitely could have made a difference.

Kilcoyne, however, denied that this posed any distraction from the task at hand.

“We were very transparent with the players about that whole process. It wasn’t taxing on the squad. It was taxing on Pearse. Had we got him off Pearse might have been, maybe, a bit leggy or something or distracted. The rest of the group, we shouldn’t have been. So we can’t use that as an excuse at all,” said the ex-Mayo forward.

The worst part of all was not getting beaten in a final, or getting beaten by their sworn rivals.

“I think what stings most is we know we had an opportunity to go and compete in a final and we didn’t put our best selves forward and that’s the thing that rankles the most.”

Where to now for this Knockmore team, who started a team with an average age of 25?

“We’ll have to go and lick our wounds and address things and see where we go. It’s not for right now to even think about it. We’ll have to regroup at some point and see where we go,” said Kilcoyne.

“There is a really good bunch of lads there. They are a phenomenal group, it’s a privilege to work with them. We’ve blooded a good few young lads this year, the club is in good stead. We’ll dust ourselves down and go again.”