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“I thought it was a decent performance from us” he said, “it was a tough match, and overall I thought we played quite well.
“We gave away more chances than I would have liked but we made quite a lot of chances as well, 19 in total.”
“I felt we deserved more than we got at the end. In the last twenty minutes or so we had enough chances to have equalised and I thought the decision to rule out a goal by Clinton Morrison was a wrong decision.”
Kerr explained: “What happened was the defender poked his leg under Clinton’s arm and he knocked the ball on to Clinton’s hand, it wasn’t as if he played the ball with his hand.”
Kerr said he was delighted with the quality of the match and regarded it as the perfect warm-up exercise ahead of the World Cup tie against France next month.
“Italy have a lot of very good players, they have world-class players playing in one of Europe’s top leagues and they were in excellent physical condition as well.”
Kerr explained that it had taken Ireland time to come to terms with Italy’s system in which they had three players playing in the central midfield positions — “It was a system we would not have played against before” he said, “and we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare to deal with it.
“But eventually we got to grips with it and I thought we did quite well. That was as good a match as we could have got “
Kerr reserved special praise for Clinton Morrison — “he took on the role and responsibility very well as the main attacker and it was a hard one against the quality of defenders Italy had.
“They were a bit better than us defensively, I felt, and that is understandable given the reputation of Italian defenders and the Italian league.”