We had every opportunity to win: Joe Fortune

Mon, 22nd August 2016

Dublin under-21 hurling manager, Joe Fortune, was left to rue a missed opportunity as his side were edged out by Galway in last Saturday's Bord Gáis Energy All-Ireland U21HC semi-final in Thurles.

The Tribesmen triumphed by two points (0-21 to 0-19) in extra-time but Dublin will reflect in their missed scoring chances in the opening half in particular.

"We spoke an awful lot over the year about when you get to this level, you have to take the opportunities and anybody watching that would see that we had ample opportunity to win," said Joe Fortune.

"Galway are a good side, a strong, physical side and they seemed to have that bit more maybe in the tank, especially in extra-time. I thought we looked dead on our feet.

"I've been in a lot of dressing-rooms and you get involved in teams but that dressing-room is devastated. One of things we speak about in Dublin is in order to get to that next level, you have to win games like that.

"You'd think we never did a shooting drill there at times. I don't know, you can't blame the six-week thing because Galway didn't have a competitive game.

"We tried everything we could in those six weeks to keep things fresh," added Joe.

"To me, we had every opportunity to win it. I don't know what we could have done extra on the line, it just seemed we didn't win that breaking ball when we needed to and when we did win it, we didn't take those easy scores.

"It's a huge disappointment to me. I was lucky enough last year to get an opportunity after what happened against Kilkenny and we put a lot of time into this.

"They're Leinster champions, nobody will ever take that away from them, but that group of players know they had a massive opportunity to get to an All-Ireland final. That's the hard thing but they'll regroup. There's a lot of players in there will play senior hurling for Dublin."