Gilroy: We won it ugly
July 11, 2011
Dublin manager Pat Gilroy
The Dubs were far from convincing in their 2-12 to 1-12 victory over Wexford at Croke Park, where a number of their stars were off-key including talisman Bernard Brogan, who was substituted in the second-half.
"You don't expect Bernard to miss the ones that he did today, but we still came out the right side of it," said Gilroy.
"The Wexford pressure was severe, and some of the options we took were not right. We didn't support the guys in the full-forward line enough. A couple of times they were far too isolated, particularly in the first half. We got the ball into their scoring area 45 times, and 33 times we got nothing off it and we needed to change it. Only for Eoghan getting injured we might have taken Bernard off a bit earlier. He is human. He's allowed have the odd off day, and in fairness to him he hasn't done that for a long time."
Gilroy feels that his team will now enter the last eight of the All-Ireland series having come through more stern tests than in previous years.
"We've been put under severe pressure in different parts of the field. Today we were dealing with two or three men back in front of our full-forward line, and we found it difficult to break it down," said the St Vincent's man.
"We still managed to score 2-12, and I know we have a fortuitous goal, but it was still good to get that kind of score when the entire full-forward really didn't play that well.
"We learnt to win in a very ugly way," he added. Tweet
