*Sean Stack and Michael O’Halloran. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill
‘MOBILITY ISSUES’ proved detrimental to Sixmilebridge’s bid to stay in the Clare senior hurling championship, manager Sean Stack has admitted.
Successive defeats to Clonlara and O’Callaghans Mills saw The Bridge bow out of the race for the Canon Hamilton. An appeal to the Munster Council for The Bridge to stay in the championship due to the ‘governance’ of new scoring difference rules was rejected and they will now face Ballyea in the Senior B semi-final.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, Bridge boss Sean Stack reflected, “That was a fairly big blow to us and we’re not quite sure what it means but regardless of what our next match is, it will be difficult to pick things up for us again”.
He felt “a lot of home truths came to the surface” in their two point defeat to The Mills. “With all due respect to the Mills, they are not quite championship contenders yet anyway so they are arguably bigger fish to fry in this championship but we didn’t appear able to step up. I mean did we play to our capacity? We probably did but it’s clearly not good enough.
“We played great bouts of hurling and in fairness there were some great scores got but we also had a hat of goal chances that we missed whereas they {O’Callaghan’s Mills] got three goal chances and had the patience to work it into the perfect position to score. We tried to blow the net off with ours but failed to finish them off. Both teams were fighting for their lives out there this evening. We dominated the first quarter and looked by far the best team but they clawed their way back in to level the game. We wonder how that happened but to be honest we were beaten for a bit of mobility in too many areas so that’s very worrying”.
Stack added, “It’s going to be a job to pick these lads up because they’re fair disappointed”.
O’Callaghans Mills manager Paul Keane was far more pleased when it came to assessing the character of his side. “A win was great but we had a target to meet in terms of scoring difference and ultimately the extent of our defeat to Crusheen cost us in the end. That said, it was good to see the fight and the performance from our lads.
“Look, we showed great character in both halves to come back at the ‘Bridge. I mean we went 1-4 to 0-0 down early on and just weren’t working hard enough so when we did start to work, we clawed it back to go in level by half-time. They [Sixmilebridge] kicked on again in the second half to go four points clear again near the finish but our lads showed great spirit again and never gave up and that was rewarded in getting over the line in the end,” he said.
Limerick native Keane remained confident they would issue a further response when it came to their relegation battle. “It was a dramatic finish, Gary [Cooney] and Colm [Cleary] worked tremendously hard inside there and got the winning goal. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re in the relegation so obviously that’s disappointing.
“We’ve four weeks to push on again. We responded very well in training after the Crusheen de-feat so we need another list now in order to display the best version of ourselves in that relegation final. We know that we’re good enough so the most important thing is that we are senior next year because we know that we are good enough to compete against the big teams”.
