No excuses from Robbie Keane after last night’s defeat

The better teams won was Robbie Keane’s succinct assessment as he spoke to the media after last night’s final Euro 2012 game for Ireland.

So Ireland’s Euro 2012 adventure ends with a third successive defeat and the joint-worst record ever in the history of the competition. With thoughts now turning to retirements, personnel changes and a very difficult World Cup qualifying campaign last night had an end-of-era feel to it.

But Ireland’s leading goalscorer was not willing to look for excuses last night, saying there was nothing more the squad could do.

“We have no excuses, our preparations went fine and we can stand here all night and discuss but we couldn't be prepared better," Keane is quoted as saying on Goal.com.

The L.A. Galaxy man was not prepared to criticize the tactics employed by Giovanni Trapattoni either.

"The criticism is always there, was for last four years, and we have always been playing that way, got our results, got here, so why change in the tournament? It's [the] manager's decision but we were quite happy the way we played for four years.

"We are obviously disappointed, we wanted to give something to our fans and to ourselves to go home with and as we didn't, we are not happy. We played well, it was a different game to the way we played previously but then come up two set pieces from which we concede and we know that it should be our stronger side. "

As for the tournament as a whole, Robbie put the three defeats to simply coming up against superior opponents.

“After all we got beaten three times but there can't be any complaints to the players, we all gave one hundred percent, we can put our hand high and simply say that we were beaten by better boys," said Keane.

Croatia, Spain and Italy were all ranked higher than us so we expected them to be better than us. It was up to us, as the inferior side, to find a way to beat them and to be super sharp defensively. As we know, neither of those things happened. Regrets, eh, we have a few.

Whatever about no excuses, or the wrong set of excuses, one man who had no regrets was Keith Andrews, at least about his red card.

The West Brom man was dismissed for a second yellow and as he went off he lashed out at a stray ball. It is reported today that Andrews will be banned for two games, which would include the visit of Germany to Dublin in October.

"I've no regrets, it was frustration," he told the Irish Independent. "I thought he [referee Cuneyt Cakir] was unfair for the majority of the game, and I still don't think it was a yellow card.

"I don't think he forgot I'd been booked. I think he was more than sure that it was my second, to be perfectly honest."