Captain Diggins describes that winning feeling as “unbelievable”

KERRY captain Jason Diggins described the feeling of captaining his county to an All-Ireland ‘B’ title as unbelievable, with the Causeway native thanking his club for the nomination for captaincy.

“It’s unbelievable in fairness, great honour. I’d like to thank the club for nominating me as captain and just to walk up the steps and lift the cup was an unbelievable feeling. To win it with all the boys that I grew up with as well is a special feeling. “

Diggins how Kerry would love to be playing at a higher level even in a one-off game as the Kingdom are very dominant at Under-21 B level.

“You want to be playing at the best level like. It would nice if we were playing the likes of Cork and Wexford outside their today maybe we mightn’t win but it would be nice to be playing at that level and giving it our best shot like.

If you win this like at least a preliminary round or something joining into the A or the first division like you know it’s the only way forward like. We can’t stay in this division forever.”

Diggins spoke of how

Kerry had to rearrange their defence at half time as the loss of midfielder Fionan Mackessy gave Derry a lifeline for the second half.

“Yeah we kind of had to rearrange things a bit because we weren’t expecting to be down to 14 at half time. We were up six points and we knew that they were going to come out and throw the kitchen sink at us. Luckily we had enough fitness and hurling to get over the line so happy at the end of the day.”

Diggins stated how Kerry put in massive work on the defensive side of the game before the final and it really paid off as the Kerry rear-guard were outstanding throughout.

“We worked hard on our defence in training because we know what our forwards are capable of doing so we just had to do it in the backs and deliver the ball up to them and let them do the scoring.”

Kerry wing-back Barry O’Mahony was proud to get over the line as this group of players have become close-knit through hurling with development squads over the years.

“It’s a great feeling. We’ve been playing with this group for a good while together so it’s nice to get something at the end of it so yeah a good achievement.”

O’Mahony also stated how this side would love to be competing at a higher level in the future as Kerry have been very dominant at this competition in recent years.

“It mightn’t be a bad idea I suppose it might be nice to test ourselves like. Look all we’ve got to do is beat what’s in front of us and that’s what we did for the competition. I suppose it might be nice to test ourselves like. Look all we’ve got to do is beat what’s in front of us and that’s what we did for the competition. I suppose It would be a nice test for us maybe wouldn’t do quite as well as we’d hope like. I think it would be a test and maybe in the next few years we might take a step up. “

O’Mahony also stated how Kerry did well to recover from the loss of Mackessy and bounce back for victory.

“Yeah I think it was a big blow. We were obviously on top but obviously when you get a player like Fionan sent off it was obviously going to have a tell on the game but look we got through it anyway and we stuck it

out.”