Padraic Joyce has described some of the refereeing decisions during the second half of Galway’s All-Ireland SFC quarter-final defeat to Dublin as ‘baffling’.

The Galway manager was especially perturbed by David Gough’s decision not to award a penalty to John Maher after he appeared to be foul in the 65th minute, but also accepted that Dublin deserved to win after finishing with a flourish.

“We had Shane (Walsh) running through on goal, he gets dragged to the ground by three lads, and no free given. We then come back, and we have an advantage on a two-pointer that John Maher catches inside the big square,” Joyce told the media at Croke Park.

“He is clearly pulled to the ground from what I can see, and the free is not given because the referee told the linesman that it wasn’t a foul, so go back to the two-point free.

“Not taking away from what Dublin did at the end there. We can put a bit of blame on ourselves to score only once when we were six up and lose by four, so we were outscored by 11 points to one. Definitely, there were some decisions there that I found baffling.

“I thought we had an extra body inside covering that (when Liam Silke received a black card), but David deemed it a penalty, so I can’t dispute that. But I would take issue with the other one, the one John Maher didn’t get. That’s a frustrating one.

“We have to own the defeat, which I’ll do, and the players will do. There was a lot of stuff in the game that didn’t go right for us. We didn’t get our hands on enough ball from kickouts. Everyone knows that.

“But we had chances, as well, we had a few bad wides. Our efficiency overall was quite good. We just didn’t see the game out. Went six up, should have pushed on more and got scores. Didn’t do it and paid the ultimate price for it.”

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