KIELY: GIVE ME A BREAK
Treaty boss John sees no value in League semis and says format change should have been brought in straight away
JOHN KIELY admits he would prefer if there were no League semi-finals as he gears his Limerick side up for one against Kilkenny tomorrow.
Should the holders get through to another decider it would take place two weeks later, with the Munster Championship opener against Clare falling just a fortnight after that.
With the change in format next year, the top two teams in the new Division 1A will contest the final so League semi-finals will be disappearing off the fixture schedule for the foreseeable future, but Kiely would prefer to have seen the back of them already.
“In an ideal world you would like a little bit more time between the competitions – I think another week would be plenty,” he said.
“Is there a need for semi-finals? I don’t think there is. The League is the League, decides who is top and there are plenty of variables in there to separate teams by points, head to head, score difference, goals for, goals against, points for, points against.
“But with a view to the groups that will form next year’s League, it’s going to be very exciting.”
With Limerick and Clare on opposite sides this weekend, there is potential for them to meet in a League final on the cusp of their Championship opener in
Ennis on April 21.
Kiely said: “We all know we don’t live in an ideal world. It’s far from it. The theorists will say this is far from ideal but what do you do? You go out and play each game as best as you can, you go out to try win every game you can, I think everybody who knows us by now knows we don’t contemplate like that, I don’t believe any of the teams do.
“Every team goes flat out every day to try and win. So we’ll be going flat to the mat to try win each game we get an opportunity to play in, Saturday night, semi-final, that’s where our focus is.
“If we qualify for a final, great and we’ll go after that then but for the minute let’s try get out of our semi-final first. Anything after that is so far down the road it’s not on the radar.”
One of the experiments that has worked particularly well for Kiely and Limerick in the League is the positioning of Cathal O’neill in defence despite making his name as a forward, with the youngster excelling at both centre-back and wing-back.
Kiely explained: “It’s been a new departure for him playing in the backs with us. He has done exceptionally well. I think he’s enjoyed his hurling there as well.
“That’s always good to see and we’ll see where it goes. But it’s a nice one to have that in our back catalogue of reference points for him. He can play six, he can play seven or he can play five for us easily.
“He could equally go and play midfield or half-forward if we saw the need as well. It gives us great flexibility and hopefully for him he’ll get enjoyment out of it as well.”
Kiely previously toyed with the idea of moving him back. He said: “We tried it out in an in-house game last year but we didn’t get too many opportunities to do it. He’s just a great athlete. He’s a big, tall lad. He’s a good distributor of the ball and he’s a able to learn quickly. When we saw it, we liked, it it’s winwin.”