CLARE’s minor hurling management have identified improving on preparation as essential for Friday’s showdown with Waterford.
On Friday, Ger O’Connell’s charges make the trip to Waterford where they know a win will secure their place in the provincial final.
Their comprehensive fourth round 2-20 0-18 win over Limerick in the Gaelic Grounds has teed up an exciting Déise duel. “We’re delighted with that. It’s nice to get a full game performance, some-thing that we’ve been striving for so we’re delighted to get back to winning ways but also produce this kind of performance when needed most,” O’Connell outlined.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, he praised the manner in which the minors bounced back from their seven point loss to Cork. “They’ve responded to an awful lot this year. Every time something has happened in a negative sense, they’ve always come back stronger. It would have been easy to sulk or wallow in self pity after the Cork result but the boys put their head down and worked hard. We as a management also worked hard to rewrite the wrongs that we did, so as to try and help the lads even more so you could definitely see the improvements of the last two weeks out there this evening which was great.
“Limerick are a good team and have been close in all the games they’ve played so we knew it would be tough and therefore a one point win would have done us this evening. As it turned out, it was a little more than that but I thought we got some lovely scores, no more so than Ian [O’Brien]’s goal there at the end, that was just a brilliantly worked goal. That’s what we’ve been working at, trying to provide the confidence to play and express themselves like that on the field. At the end of the day, these are only young fellas of 15, 16 or 17 so why not go out and hurl and enjoy it? Enjoy the game you love playing so that’s basically our message,” the Clonlara man said.
He admitted management have found the quick resets from game to game to be a challenge. “We’re into a knock-out phase now but we hadn’t thought about Waterford up to now as you can only con-centrate on one game at a time in this round-robin series because the teams are so good in Munster that you can’t look past anyone or look ahead. That’s probably one of the reasons we got caught against Cork was the quick transition of me being a first year manager, it caught us and particularly me in the speed in which we needed to reset so hopefully we’ll be a lot more prepared this week to roll into Waterford”.
