County SHC: All to play for in second round

Causeway v Lixnaw Sunday, July 1 Austin Stack Park 6pm

IT’S always hard to know which way these winners’ round games will go.

The pressure is off and it’s not always clear that going straight to the semi-final is the advantage it’s cracked up to be. If a quarter-final goes to a replay the winner of this second round contest can be left twiddling their thumbs for a bit longer than is advisable.

All the same you’d prefer to be straight into a semi-final as not, there’s no guarantee that you’ll come through the quarter-final stage after all. Still there’s enough ambiguity about the thing that the shackles should come off for both these teams to some certain extent.

Neither would view defeat as anything other than a temporary set-back, so why not go out and express yourself? At their best both of these sides are capable of playing an exciting brand of hurling.

That wasn’t necessarily evident in Lixnaw’s clash with Kilmoyley in the opening round. That was a cagey enough affair, the vast majority of scores from both sides came from the placed ball. In itself that’s not altogether that out of the ordinary for the Kerry county hurling championship admittedly.

Lixnaw had a greater spread of scorers than Kilmoyley did and deservedly won the game. That said they’ll need a little bit more variety – Shane Conway scored ten frees out of their sixteen point total – if they’re to get the better of Causeway this weekend.

For their part Causeway looked pretty tasty up front when they had to deliver scores. The positioning of Bryan Murphy on the half-forward line was a qualified success. He started off with a bang, scoring two early points and assisting another two, but his influence waned as the game went on in that sector of the field.

We’ve a feeling Sunday’s game will be tight, we’ve a feeling it will come down to the final ten or fifteen minutes and on that basis we’d be learning towards a Causeway side, which is able to spring serious talent off the bench.

It was telling in the first round, it could be telling here.

Verdict: Causeway

Causeway’s Anthony Fealy in action against St Brendans’ Kevin Orpen in the first round Photo by Domnick Walsh / Eye Focus