Cookstown selector takes issue with officiating in heated provincial defeat

By Niall Gartland

COOKSTOWN’S Conor Bayne has slammed the performance of the officials in a fractious Ulster Junior Club Championship defeat to Monaghan outfit Sean McDermott’s on Saturday.

Fr Rocks had three men sent to the line during a stop-start second-half against the Monaghan champions, and Bayne, who was deputising for absent manager Conall Lavery, was hugely aggrieved with the lack of communication and general decision-making from referee Darren O’Hare and his team.

“I thought the officiating was very poor. There were things that were happening in front of us, and we were trying to speak to the linesman. He wouldn’t speak back to us, he wouldn’t give us any information about anything.

“I thought the three sendings off were very, very poor, to be perfectly honest.

“I think the referee was letting them away with a lot more than he was letting our boys away with.”

Whatever one made of the sending offs, the referee set the tone early on when Sean McDermott’s midfielder Paraic McGuirk was lucky to stay on the pitch after a mis-timed challenge on Cookstown’s Ruairi Mullan, who had to go off injured. It was no surprise then, that an already-physical contest boiled over in the second-half, but at the same time, Bayne acknowledged that Sean McDermott’s deserved their 3-8 to 1-6 victory.

“They’re a very good team. There’s not many junior teams you’re going to play that have three county men running around the field.

“They’re very big and they’re very physically strong. With Kearns and their big captain in the middle of the field, they were very strong, and they’re very competent footballers.

“Once we went one man down, it was very difficult, but when we went two, and then there down, they just had runners everywhere.

“I can’t fault our boys for effort, but at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game, and the numbers won out.”

It was a frustrating afternoon for Fr Rock’s. Their opponents started the game at a blistering pace and led by 1-2 to no score after only eight minutes of play. It looked like a hammering job was on the cards – McGuirk opened the scoring after ten seconds, and worse was to follow from a Cookstown perspective after Adam O’Driscoll scored his first of two goals.

Fr Rock’s couldn’t get to the pitch of battle at all, and they were bottled up time-and-time again on their opponents ’45’ metre line, while their defensive rearguard looked ill-at-ease every time McDermott’s mounted an attack.

Yet they showed tremendous courage to absorb the McDermott’s onslaught and the unfortunate loss of their midfielder Ruairi Mullen to injury, and played some great football to end up with a 1-4 to 1-3 lead at the half-time interval.

The Sean McDermott’s players were presumably read the riot act at the interval, and started the second-half with merciless intent. Their intercounty star Niall Kearns seized the initiative and won a penalty straight after the throw-in, and O’Driscoll made no mistake from the spot-kick. They pressed on with classy scores from O’Driscoll and Kearns, and all of a sudden they had moved into a 2-5 to 1-4 lead.

The rest of the game was a stop-start affair, with three Cookstown players sent off, and Sean McDermott’s applied the coup de grace with a late goal from substitute Eamonn McQuillan