‘ONLY THE LEAGUE’.. A MYTH
Injured Walsh admits he won’t be back playing for 10 weeks and rubbishes talk that no-one cares about NHL title by insisting the Cats want to win it
WALTER WALSH has revealed that he is set to miss the first couple of rounds of Kilkenny’s Championship campaign as he recovers from a groin injury.
Walsh suffered the injury in February’s League win over Offaly and is halfway through the recovery period of at least 10 weeks.
It obviously rules him out of Saturday’s League final against Clare, and Kilkenny open their Leinster Championship campaign at home to Antrim on April 21 followed by a trip to Galway the following weekend. They then have a fortnight break before the short trip to Carlow.
Speaking at the launch of the Leinster Championships at Collins Barracks in Dublin yesterday, he explained: “It’s just taking a bit of time, just a bit of separation from the bone. I’m lucky I didn’t need an operation, just where it is on the top of the groin. So, hopefully I’ll be back in four or five weeks.
“It was rest for the first couple of weeks and then I’ve been doing rehab the last few weeks.
“You don’t know after that how well you are going to respond to it either. So, yeah, I’ll take the 10 or 12 weeks it is, definitely.”
Now 32, Walsh has endured more than his fair share of injury problems in recent years though he laughed off suggestions that the advancing years may be a factor.
“Last year I picked up an eight-week injury around the end of the League and the year before that. So it is frustrating because you are hoping to play the League.
“The way the last two years have transpired I was just coming back towards the end of the round robin so I haven’t got a clean run at it.
“It is unfortunate, 2022 was my groin, last year my hamstring and back to my other groin now. But look, there are players who have got far worse injuries as well.”
Kilkenny bid for their first outright League title since 2018 on Saturday having shared it with
Tipperary during the Coviddisrupted 2021 season.
“There are a lot of players on our team who haven’t got a National League medal,” Walsh noted.
“It’s a national final so it’s massive. You want to win it. ‘Only the league’ is kind of talked about but these are all games that teams are trying to win.
“You can look at it any way you want but you want to win every game you go out to play. No manager or team goes out to lose a game. The league is very important for us.”
Ultimately, the season will be judged on All-ireland success, with Kilkenny now in their ninth year without the Liam Maccarthy Cup.
He added: “It’s not a weight. You don’t say, ‘We haven’t won this in 10 years… we have to win this year’. You just take it step by step, looking to push on every game.”