Conor Counihan has admitted that Cork's style of football hasn't been easy on the eye this year.

However, he insists that winning is all the matters and would gladly settle for another one-point victory in next month's All-Ireland final against either Kildare or Down.

"Sunday's performance was disappointing, but it does leave an awful lot of room for manoeuvre in terms of work. You can now go to fellas and show them four or five things to improve on for the final," he said in the Irish Examiner.

"I'd happily take the same again in the final. If we can get through it by a point, that's all that matters. There's no-one left out there to produce a show at this stage," he declared.

Counihan accepted that Cork's game plan against Dublin on Sunday went out the window after Bernard Brogan's first minute goal.

"Our game plan was to get one of those early goals," he explained.

"We figured that if we kept a bit of width to our game, it would work for us and we did that well occasionally. But there were times when we didn't stick to the plan and we went down the middle and consequently turned over a lot of ball.

"Dublin were dropping a man back in front of the full forward line so, in fairness to our lads outside trying to get ball into the forwards, they didn't want to be turning over ball through an interception either. It's a question of being patient and work the ball through from outside with your extra man.

"Yes that left the full forward line starved at times. But it wasn't that we didn't create goalscoring opportunities with the run - Pearse O'Neill and Daniel Goulding's one when he fisted it to the net, for instance. Plus there were a few more handy points that you'd like to have taken.

"On the debit side, we weren't so good on the breaks. That's a worry, because breaks are almost more important than primary possession now, because there's so little of that available." Tweet

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