Ryan left frustrated as Football League campaign ends

By Stephen Barry

After ending their National League campaign with their fourth successive defeat on Sunday, Tipperary manager Philly Ryan’s primary criticism was reserved for his sides failure to use the extra man against Wicklow. At the same time, he felt his team didn’t get any favours from the officials.

Jack Kirwan was sent off in the twelfth minute for a forceful high tackle on Mikey O’Shea. It was the only card flashed all afternoon by referee Eoin Morrissey.

Ryan referenced an incident moments earlier where Paudie Feehan left the field dazed after a collision with John Paul Nolan. He took equal issue with subsequent decisions.

“I’ll be straight about this. I felt after the sending-off, a lot of the marginal decisions went with Wicklow,” Ryan said.

“I’m not being critical of the officiating, but I just felt that’s the way it went. There were certain tackles we put in that became frees.

“Personally, I felt the marginal decisions went against us. Even before the red card, there was a tackle and no action taken. I really thought the tackle wasn’t a good one on Paudie. It was an unfortunate incident.

“After that, we just couldn’t get a free. I might be wrong, and I’ll review it and I’ll apologise to the officials if I am wrong.”

He added: “That’s not getting away from the fact we weren’t good on the day. Being honest, we were probably a bit tired after the Wexford game last week. The lads put a lot of energy into that game.

“I can make all the excuses I want but we just didn’t hit the marks that we would like to hit.”

The inability to exploit a 15v14 numerical advantage over the closing hour topped Tipp’s list of issues.

“Without a doubt, we didn’t deal with it very well. Wicklow dealt better. You’d wonder at times who had the extra man out on the field,” said Ryan.

“We’ll have to have a look at that and deal with it better. We’d be critical of ourselves. The extra man, at the back or at the front, we just didn’t use it.”

Tipp conceded kick-outs in the first half before switching to press in the second.

“We came with a system that worked for us last week. It didn’t work this week,” said Ryan.

“At half-time, we changed that. We moved Mark (Russell) back into the half-back line and tried to press their kick-out.”

With a fortnight until their Munster Championship opener against Waterford, Ryan hopes to see “one or two” of Tipp’s injury-hit players return.

“We won’t have everybody back,” he added.

“As the year goes on and we get deeper into the Tailteann Cup, we’ll have a few more of the lads back.”