Stephen Fox's late miss was the main talking point for just about everybody as the players and officials started to drift out of the dressing rooms at Tolka Park last night and so it was hardly surprising that the 23-year-old striker was very much in demand as he attempted to make his way towards the Bray Wanderers bus.

"Well, I'd have to hold my hand up. I definitely should have scored but I was concentrating so much on getting it on target that it caught my shoulder and that sort of took all the power out of it.

"Even then, and I don't want to sound as if I'm making excuses, I thought the keeper pulled off a good save but I really think that I would have scored if I'd connected with it properly."

The miss was a particularly harsh blow for Fox because afterwards it overshadowed what had, generally, been a very good display. "I enjoyed it a lot," he said "but then it was a cup final and how many of them are you going to get to play in during your career?

"Well, okay," he added with a hint of embarrassment "we'll have another one next week now but it's not exactly the same thing, is it?"

The man on the other end of the squandered opportunity was giving a good bit of the credit to the striker, too, with Brian McKenna, grinning from ear to ear and clutching his Man of the Match award, identifying the intervention of Fox's shoulder as a key factor in Harps having another crack at winning the trophy.

"I don't think he got a clean header because if he had I think he would have scored. It was lucky for us that he didn't because now we have a second chance."

Then there was that other save. The one from Jonathon Speak in the first half when the veteran Harps striker had almost buried the ball in his own net from eight or 10 yards out. "Yeah, I was asking him about that at half-time. I thought it was the wind that had fooled him but he said it was the ball.

"We've only really started playing with these Umbro balls lately and they move around a lot. Speaky said that as that corner came in it went all over the place and he couldn't really tell where he was going to connect with it."

On balance, however, he admitted that Bray had been slightly the better side yesterday and that Pat Devlin, in particular, had played his hand well. "Today they got the tactics right. they pushed up on (Tom) Mohan and (Eamon) Kavanagh and stopped them playing a bit. That made it difficult to get in behind them and get crosses in, which made it very difficult for our front lads to anything much at all. Overall, you'd have to say, for that, they were worth their draw and it'll be up to us to better next week."

A few yards away Declan Boyle was reaching much the same conclusion even if he wasn't quite as magnanimous about the opposition's performance.

"Tactically they were well up for the game," he remarked "although they were probably a bit negative because for long stretches there they seemed to have six in mid-field which made it very difficult to do anything at all.

"The fact is, though, that we'll have to work harder next week at breaking them down. We'll have to try to get in there and get an early goal, I think that would change things and make them come out and play a bit more, but the main thing in the replay will be to take the initiative, if we can do that then we can still win it. After all, we've done it the hard way in every other round of the cup this season."