As Reds ready for battle

village, the fact I’m an hour down the road I’m not seeing that, I’m not in the village on a daily basis. From talking to the players I think they’re just looking forward to it at this stage. I think they realise it’s not an opportunity they’ll get every year and I think they’re focused on putting in a performance.”

Glenealy won’t be given much of a chance against the Kilkenny opposition and Laffan would have pulled off a huge shock if he leads the team to victory, what does he see in St Patrick’s?

“They seem to be strong all over, they’re putting up big scores. They scored 25 points on the quarter final and 2-20 last weekend in the quarter final. They’ve three or four very strong forwards. They’re half back line are supposed to be physically strong, they’re midfielders are supposed to be mobile. I have done a little bit of work on it but from I’m hearing they’re not going to have too many weaknesses.

“I’m trying to focus on our team now and get a performance out of our lads and see where it takes us. If we were to focus too much on the opposition we might nullify our own positives. We have to score to win these matches so there’s no point in thinking too negative. We have to perform to the best of our ability.

“If we get a good performance it will take a very good team to beat us. By all accounts they are very strong but I don’t think we can let that hamper us.”

Not too many managers will tell you their tactical plans in advance but Laffan is fairly relaxed about who will mark Kevin Kelly.

“Sure look if he’s in the full forward line Warren will pick him up and if he’s in the half forward line Danny will pick him up. It’s very straight forward, I don’t want to change our team around too much to suit them. For some of the matches he moved out to midfield. They tend to move their forwards around quite a bit, their wing forwards can end up corner forward and vice versa.

“It’s probably hard to nail them down but we’ll try to plan for as many eventualities as we can.”