Scotstown manager David McCague insisted the Ulster Club SFC semi-final against Newbridge should have been finished, despite the worsening weather conditions which forced referee Joe McQuillan to abandon the tie at half-time.<\/p>\n
The Monaghan champions were ahead by four points at O\u2019Neills Healy Park when the Cavan official called a half, citing concerns over players safety as wind and rain battered the ground on a wintry afternoon in Omagh.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t answer for the opposition management team, but we wanted to play on,\u201d said McCague.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m annoyed that the game wasn\u2019t finished, but I\u2019m delighted that we\u2019re still in the Ulster Championship. There\u2019s sort of mixed emotions on that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about the players as well, this is a big part of players\u2019 lives, they have put an awful lot on the line over the past two weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe make huge demands off them, and those demands will continue.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
McCague admitted his position was somewhat influenced by the 1-4 to 0-3 scoreline that favoured his team as they plodded off the squelching surface at the half-time whistle.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d be lying if I said it didn\u2019t. we were in a good position in the game, but the game was somewhat of a lottery out there as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe won the first half by four points, but there\u2019s nothing to say that Newbridge couldn\u2019t have won the second half by five points, and at that point we would have been out of the Ulster Championship, so in that regard, the scoreboard at half-time doesn\u2019t haven any bearing on how I feel at the moment, because it\u2019s only half-time, and nobody ever wins a game at half-time.”<\/p>\n
The Newbridge management declined to comment on the decision to abandon the game as the Ulster Council prepared to convene an emergency meeting to discuss options for a re-fixture.<\/p>\n
Ulster GAA president Michael Geoghan said there was no way of predicting the deterioration of weather conditions as the game progressed through an increasingly turgid first half.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way the conditions deteriorated after 30 minutes on that pitch he said it was getting worse and he feared for player safety in the second half. The referee was Joe McQuillan, one of the most experienced referees in the country. His call we trust 100%, that was Joe\u2019s call and he decided to call the game off,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pitch was inspected this morning before the first game. At that stage the forecast was for very, very light rain which was fine.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first game went ahead and there were no issues whatsoever. Nobody could have forecast that rain that came in the second half. We live in Ireland, we know it\u2019s winter football, we know the type of weather we can get and unfortunately that\u2019s what happened today. Conditions just got worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe weather apps earlier were giving us windy conditions, no sign or word of rain, so we can\u2019t forecast what the weather will be.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scotstown manager David McCague insisted the Ulster Club SFC semi-final against Newbridge should have been finished, despite the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1965,1128,42,43,850,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-156269","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-hurling","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-sport","13":"tag-top-news","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-topnews","16":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}