Don Givens was disappointed last night after his U-20 side were defeated 2-0 by Italy despite playing well. Ireland went down to two early second half goals but also had chances to score and could easily have had a result had they been more clinical in front of goal.
He said, "We knew Italy were a good side. You're not going to get six chances against them. You'll only get one-and-a-half and one of them's got to go in. There were five people making their debuts tonight, so in those sort of circumstances playing against Italy is never easy, especially for the debutantes. So I'm quite happy with some of the performances there. Obviously I'm bitterly disappointed that we are now meaningless as regards to the tournament, but we've got some positives out of that."
He then went on to criticise Portuguese referee, Duarte Pereira Gomes, saying, "We did perform quite well, and I believe playing against Italy is made all the more difficult if you don't have a strong referee and tonight we had a very, very poor referee. But that's not the cause of the result, they scored two goals and we didn't."
Filed by Johnny Proby
