Morrison never as proud as he lets fly at attitudes
John Morrison has never been a man who minces his words and he certainly didn't last Sunday in Cusack Park, claiming "The sickening thing is my team have won the match but they didn't win it and that is f***ing hard to take."
In an interview that touched on the attitude of Leitrim supporters and clubs, the performance of the referee, absent players and the standard of opponents Clare, John concluded with "I am ultra, ultra proud of the Leitrim boys today, I'm gutted for them because it is a horrible, horrible result and they were ten points better than Clare."
His opening remarks were no less forthright and weren't exactly brimming with respect for Clare – "I feel gutted for the boys but I have never felt as proud. I just want to go home because I am disgusted, not with the boys but with the result.
"I've never seen as many of them play as well and having watched the antics of the Clare management, thinking they've got a team, they haven't even got a f***ing team that can play together, they've no structure.
"They've got goals that shouldn't have happened, they were beat out of sight off the field the whole day. At the end of the day, on everything but the scoreboard, we have beaten them out of sight. Apart from the two goals that shouldn't have happened, we were eight to ten points better than that team.
"I won't, and you can quote that, I won't down the Leitrim players today. They were excellent, to put 17 points on the board. I'll take nothing but positives from today. It is seven hours for me to get home and that is a lot of sitting, frustrated, knowing that we lost today."
The Armagh man was also unhappy with the standard of referees in Division Four – "There were some weird decisions there today, the referee pulled out of one there at the end. The referees are not good.
"If you tell me we have a Division Four referee who is not allowed referee a Division One match, then that is not an official referee for me. He is just some person thrown in to try him out."
Morrison also returned to a personal bug-bear – the attitude of Leitrim people to the Senior team and John admitted that he didn't mean his apology of last year when he criticised the attitude of the County's supporters.
"I've said this before and I had to apologise before and I didn't really mean that apology. I was asked to apologise because until Leitrim starts believing in their players, I told them today that these boys are trying to please a father who doesn't value them, who thinks they're s**t and spends his whole life trying to please.
"We've told them that and that's what we've been at this last fortnight and they've started to do things themselves.
"Even yourself, and that is not a criticism of you, I used your paper. You know in your heart that sending them down to Ennis, Leitrim never do well. Nobody in Leitrim expected them to win so they are never going to win.
"People didn't give us a chance of promotion. Once we were beaten by Waterford, everybody in Leitrim started to in their heads, and let nobody deny it, thinking how can we get our boys back to the clubs, don’t let them near the county, they are going nowhere.
“So we have to battle against that, boys coming looking for boys to play in challenge matches. If you said that in Armagh, you’d be chased out over a hedge and even people in Armagh don’t think Armagh are going to do well this year.
“But nobody does anything less than promote their county. I told those boys in there that they are not Gortletteragh people or Bornacoola people, they’re Leitrim men, they are representing Leitrim.”
John also refused to use the absence of players as any sort of excuse for the loss in Ennis – “My argument to you is that I don’t train ghosts, I train what comes to me. At the end of the day, there is club and county and those two guys got injured with their clubs. That needs to be sorted out.
“But at the end of the day, they are not there, they’re not there so we didn’t miss two players. We had a team good enough to win. At the end of the day, we didn’t have Emlyn Mulligan last year, in fact, I’ve never seen Emlyn Mulligan. I’ve seen him one match against London.
“Declan Maxwell is coming back, Colin Regan was just back. The two boys aren’t there so we have to move on and we’ll still build a team capable of beating Roscommon in the championship.”
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Weather for Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland
Tuesday 22 May 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 11 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: South
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: South
