John Cleary stays tight-lipped on future as Cork manager

CORK football manager John Cleary refused to be drawn on his future after his current four-year term ended with this championship exit at the hands of Dublin.

There would be strong support in the county for Cleary to remain in the position and this campaign finished with a positive performance but he was keeping his thoughts to himself.

“I won't say anything at the moment,” said Cleary. “My term is up now, I've been four years in it, and as anyone will know it's tough going, but look, we'll see during the week, or we'll talk to the relevant parties or whatever. But look, at this stage now, my term is up, so we'll see what the future holds going forward.”

A 'gutted' Cleary was proud of his team’s display as they came up three points short of Dublin but was critical of some of the calls made by referee Seán Hurson.

“We looked like we were going in at half-time, maybe four points up, and then Dublin got a great two-pointer. But the second half then, that was nip and tuck, and their goal was a big score. But we battled back again, and we had a two-pointer to level it, a free just into the goalie's hands.

“I suppose we were a bit starved of possession at times there, we couldn't do anything with Dublin's kick-out particularly, which had been successful for us all year, and I thought we didn't get the rub of the green from the referee either.

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“I don't like criticising referees, but some of them (decisions) were three feet from me and I could not understand it. And then when it happened the other way, Dublin seemed to get them. There was one off the ball then, and we were looking down the first half, the exact same thing was happening, and we didn't get any of them.”

Cleary was delighted with his inside forward line’s return of 1-8 from play. “Three very good players in fairness, Mark [Cronin], Brian [Hurley] and Chris Óg [Jones] so we knew if we could get the ball into them, that they would do that sort of damage, and in fairness, we didn't miss an awful lot.

“Other days I've been sitting here and we've missed goals and points and everything all over the place. I think we were very efficient, I think our problem was probably to try and get enough ball in hands, and we weren't able to do enough of that.

“I think Dublin won 90% of their own kick-outs maybe. I think we won maybe something over 50% of ours, and with the ball that we were getting, we were very efficient, and any time we did go up the field, we did bore holes in them at times, but unfortunately just fell short in the end.”

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