Tipperary manager hopes to have some of his walking wounded back for Munster championship

“We’re disappointed with the result today. We played with an extra man for a lot of the game,” Tipperary senior football manager Philly Ryan stated after his team suffered a 0-21 to 0-12 defeat by Wicklow in Clonmel on Sunday in their final game of Division 4 of the Allianz National League.

“I felt after the sending-off (of Wicklow’s Jack Kirwan, in the 11th minute) a lot of the marginal decisions went with Wicklow. I’m not being critical of the officiating but I felt that’s the way it went. I felt there were certain tackles that we put in that became frees,” he said.

“I thought even before the red card there was a tackle and no action taken. I really thought that the tackle on Paudie (Feehan) wasn’t a good one, it's an unfortunate incident, and after that we just couldn’t get a free.

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“I might be wrong, I’ll review it and I’ll apologise to the officials if I am wrong.

“That’s not getting away from the fact that we weren’t good on the day.

“We will have to look at playing with an extra man after this, without a doubt, we didn’t deal with it very well. You would wonder at times who had the extra man out on the field.

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“To be honest we were probably a bit tired after the Wexford game last week, the lads put a lot of energy into that game.
“We came with the same system that worked for us last week, it didn’t work this week. Wicklow stretched us out a bit more than Wexford did last week, and they were very good, obviously they were pushing for promotion.

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

“To be fair, we have a lot of players out injured at the moment, they’re due back in the next couple of weeks, hopefully. It’s a good opportunity for the fringe players, who are working away there the whole time.

“I wouldn't be too disappointed with the league campaign, we probably got a start we didn’t expect to get. We came in late in December, we tried to put a panel together, we lost a lot of players from last year, we were stepped down by the GPA for five days over Christmas. After Christmas we came in and had to go at it hot and heavy, and four weeks later you’re straight into the league.

“We got a good bounce at the start of the league, probably with a new management team and new systems in place, with a lot of different players.

“We couldn’t maintain it, we picked up a few injuries. Things probably changed when we went down against London in Thurles. We got beaten there and dropped the heads for a bit but I felt we came back and the lads have been training very hard, their effort in training has been very commendable.

“We’re playing Waterford in the Munster championship in two weeks, we won’t drop this off now.

“Hopefully one or two of the injured players will be back for the Waterford game. We won’t have everyone back, as the year goes on and we get deeper into the Tailteann Cup and have a run in that we will get a few more of the lads back, and these younger lads will be blooded as well”.