Crotta boss looks to the future after positive year

IT’S never over until the fat lady sings.

Galway know that. Clare know that and Cork – to their cost – know that after a weekend of stunning hurling action on the inter-county scene. At the domestic level it’s a truism that will sting Crotta O’Neills.

Certainly they would never have been so bold as to presume, but at nine points up with just seconds to go in the first half they had to have thought it was looking very good for them indeed. Seán Maunsell’s goal, however, turned this game on its head.

“We’re disappointed,” Crotta boss Pádraig Cronin said.

“We thought we’d played a decent enough first half. We were up nine points just a minute to go before half-time and if you could have held that... we conceded a sucker-punch of a goal just on the stroke of half-time to bring it back to six.

“Now it was still a healthy lead, but if we had the nine with a young team in the second half facing into the breeze it would have been a major boost. That was a small bit of a killer blow, but then the second half we didn’t seem to come out.

“We didn’t seem to play as well as I thought we would, but that will happen with a young team. I think there were ten or twelve Under 21s there at one stage, so it was a big ask.”

Kilmoyley took control of that second half with a powerful performance on the half-back line led by Dougie Fitzell and Tom Murnane.

“It was probably against the wind in the second half they weren’t going as far,” Cronin suggests when asked about Kilmoyley’s second half dominance in the sector.

“Mike Lynch was a massive loss to us there in the first half. Once we hit it long into him he was able to win it inside and he scored the goal and he was able to hold it up. That avenue was gone to us for the second half, that physical strength inside and to be fair to him I think he was a major loss.

“Saying that Kilmoyley pushed forward in fairness to them and we just lost our way and we didn’t have the physical strength under the puck-out, we’d taken Barry Mahony back to centre-back with the idea that we’d launch from there, but it didn’t work out for us.”

As for the season as a whole, there’s plenty to be positive about from the Dromakee outfit’s point of view.

“You can’t be too disappointed,” Cronin insists.

“You have to walk before you can run and they’re very young. They were excellent in the first half against Ballyduff. They were pretty good again against Kilmoyley in the first half.

“It’s just to try and get a bit of consistency and get it over the whole hour, do that and I think we’ll be a match for anyone, but look there’s a good few minors coming through again next year and the year after.

“The squad will be getting stronger and stronger. You have to take positives from it, they played some very good hurling, but only in small patches. There’s no reason if you can play it for half an hour that you couldn’t for an hour. It’s just to find that balance and hopefully it will come.”

Kilmoyley manager Shane Brick, meanwhile, was understandably a relieved man.

“We’re delighted obviously with the result, but the first half performance you couldn’t be happy with a lot of aspects. Look we’ll analyse that in the next few days, but just delighted to get the result. There was a lot of them stepped up their performances from the first half.”