LOSING FINAL WOULD HAVE FINISHED US!
CIAN LYNCH has admitted that had his Limerick team lost this year’s All-Ireland hurling final, it would have been ‘very hard’ for them to bounce back. The party is set to continue in Limerick when the individual awards are handed out next month as the county’s first All-Ireland win in 45 years is likely to be reflected at the All-Star awards, where the entire Limerick team has been nominated and Lynch has been short-listed for player of the year.
But the 22-year-old Patrickswell clubman admitted yesterday that it chills him to think how it would have impacted the group had Galway completed an astonishing comeback, which saw them come from eightpoints with two minutes of normal time left to coming within Joe Canning’s missed free of forcing a replay.
Lynch has conceded that had Limerick left that game behind them, there may have been no coming back from it.
‘It would have been very hard,’ admitted Lynch, speaking at the launch of Bord Bia’s Quality Assured Eggs Campaign.
‘I know in the last few minutes that they started coming back at us and kept going but I’d say if we’d lost it would have been hard to come back but those are the joys of sport.
‘Anything could happen on any given day, especially this year: you saw teams in the Championship winning by eight, nine, 10 points at one stage and it would come back to a point or two by the end of the game.
‘For us it hasn’t entered our head because we got over the line but I presume if we had lost it would have been hard to bounce back because you can see how losing a final or a big game haunts teams for a long time but thank God, we got over the line,’ added Lynch.
And Lynch insists that the team’s appetite will not be sated by their Liam MacCarthy success, insisting that they are determined to raise the bar even higher next season.
‘You always want more,’ he said.
‘Our generation had never experienced winning a senior All-Ireland but we want to come back and drive things on. But there’s no point getting carried away or thinking we’re going to win the All-Ireland next year. We’re in the here and now and we’re with the clubs at the moment so our main focus is the semi-final next week.
‘I know we were kind of all arms around each other all along but from here on in there will be probably skelps taken out of the lot of us.’