Paul Cook has a reputation for plain speaking and, having seen his Sligo Rovers side lose 1-0 to Shamrock Rovers on Friday night, he was in typically frank form when he spoke to the press after the game.

“It’s hard to take”, said Cook, “I just said that to the lads. I thought we deserved something out of the game. I think any fair observer would agree with that but you’ve got to respect Shamrock Rovers and the league position they’re in and you’ve got to give them credit for taking another result. They’re on a fantastic run.”

It was a game that his side had dominated for periods, particularly in the opening half, but there was little room for consolation in the fact that his team had made the league leaders fight extremely hard for their three points. When I was suggested that the performance of his players provided a boost for the future he was clearly unmoved.

“Not really. With the best will in the world we’re on a good run and we don’t like getting beat. You know, we come away to play attractive football; we passed the ball, we had good chances in the first half to take the lead, which we should have done, and we didn’t. And you’d always feel that that comes back to haunt you.”

Nor was there any sense that Sligo’s list of absent players was something that Cook wished to put forward as a contributory factor in his teams defeat. Hugo Almeida, Romauld Boco, Richie Ryan, Derek Foran and Richard Brush were all unavailable for one reason or another but the Sligo boss was in no mood for self pity.

“Yeah, but that’s football isn’t it. I’m not one of those managers that want to make excuses. We put a team out that we thought could win, we came here to try and win the game. We actually felt that if we could win here tonight, we’d have a slim chance of still winning the league. Unfortunately now our chance is gone and it leaves a few other teams to fight it out and good luck to them.”

Finally, Cook addressed the issue of Padraig Amond’s recent departure to Portuguese side Pacos Ferreira, again refusing to allow this as relevant to the result of the game.

“Mathew Blinkhorn was magnificent for us tonight up front, you can go on about it but the minute we don’t score people will say we miss Amond. They haven’t really realised we never scored in Richmond the other week when he was playing and we scored one at Finn Harps (when Amond remained on the bench until the 77th minute). But Podge has moved on and we wish him every success, but football is about the players you’ve got, not the ones you haven’t.”