Seven week hiatus will be a major handicap for Rebels says Hartnett
CORK’S failure to Limerick last Sunday means they won’t have another competitive game before they take on Tipperary in the Munster championship on May 21, but selector Pat Hartnett believes the seven-week hiatus is isn’t going to be a major handicap.
“We’ve had a fairly robust league, I think we’ve already benefited considerably from it, and it was a good test of where we are right now.
“We won three of our fivegames in Division 1A, we got second place in the group, we’ve blooded a lot of new players, so we can take a lot of positives from the campaign overall,” stated the former Midleton and Cork star
Hartnett made no attempt to conceal his disappointment following the league quarter-final defeat, but he stressed how important it was to keep everything in context.
“At the start of the season, our main aim was to stay in Division 1A, and to give a lot of young players a chance to show what they could do in a very competitive environment, and you’d have to say the likes of Mark Coleman, Shane Kingston, Luke Meade, Darragh Fitzgibbon, Michael Cahalane, and Colm Spillane have done outstandingly well.
“The more experienced guys have also stepped up, so, while we didn’t get the result we wanted today, the league has been very satisfactory relative to where we were this time last year. We’re disappointed with the performance against Limerick, who hurled well in fairness, because it was a game we expected to win.
“I felt we did well against Kilkenny in Nowlan Park, and we then had a couple of good wins over Waterford away and over the All-Ireland champions Tipperary down here, so we had every reason to be hopeful of making further progress in the league, but we were very flat today, we were outperformed by Limerick, and, while the effort was there, I thought we didn’t do ourselves justice.
“We’ll try to assess the reason for that, but it looked as if this was possibly a league game too far for us in a period of three or four weeks,” he suggested.
“We definitely made a lot of mistakes, but the important thing is you admit it, number one, you learn from them number two, and you don’t repeat them the next day. We look at things after every game, regardless of whether we win or lose, we’ll do it again after today, and we’ll definitely regroup and move on from this.
“We have seven weeks now to prepare for the championship game against Tipp, who are obviously a very formidable outfit, but we know we are capable of better than what we produced today, and I’m in no doubt we are in a stronger position than we were before the league started.”