Lixnaw and Ballyduff to contest County SHC Final
YOU’D be forgiven for thinking that the Kilmoyley dressing room must have been a fairly serene place during the half-time break. Everything seemed to be going exactly according to plan. Six points out front and they’d still not hurled anywhere near their best, a place in the final looked theirs for the taking.
“No, no, not at all,” Kilmoyley boss Fergie O’Loughlin later reflected.
“Even at half-time we thought we were in trouble in a few places. I think a lot of our hurling was stop start. It wasn’t fluent. What we needed to do to Ballyduff was bring a high tempo, high intensity game, which we didn’t bring in the first half.
“Just stop-start, it was awful sluggish even though we were six points up at half-time.
“So there was a little bit of concern at half-time, but look it we mentioned it there in our dressing room, hunger is the greatest sauce and in the second half Ballyduff had that in abundance. From the off they got five scores to put us on the back foot and they were by far the better team.”
One man for whom O’Loughlin was full of praise was Pádraig Boyle.
“He was the difference today,” he commented.
“He cut us apart. He was outstanding. We put three different markers on him, but he had a fantastic game and he was the difference.”
Another key battle was that between Paud Costello and Daniel Collins.
“It was fantastic,” O’Loughlin reflected.
“You know most teams will think if they stop Daniel Collins they’ll have a major hole put in Kilmoyley and today Paud did a good job on Daniel. He’s a great worker. I know him from the county scene, he’s an excellent individual, a great athlete and you could sense it today that he’d probably be on Daniel and he did a good job as well.”
Ballyduff chairman Liam Ross, naturally enough, was cock-ahoop after the game.
“I suppose everyone had us written off that we were old and we were this, but we had faith in our guys,” he commented.
“They put in a hard lot of work. Okay it was ten points to four at half-time and there were eight frees and we knew in the end that it was frees were going to kill us in the end. We told them that if they didn’t give away frees in the second half, if we only limited them to four frees, which I think we did, if we score 1-15 in total we’d win the game.”
The first half performance, however, was desperately poor.
“We were standing off them,” he said.
“Standing off their players and giving them too much respect, we knew that we had the guys to push it on and up the intensity just that one percent more even and just drive it on.
“In the fairness to the lads anybody could see it was the best second half of hurling in the county in years.
“They really upped it and, in fairness to the two subs we brought in, Gary [O’Brien] changed the game inside and Paul [O’Carroll] came along and won the break for the first point that we got that gave us the momentum that we would drive on.”