*Photograph: Burren Eye Photography
Kilrush Shamrocks will not be involved in the blame game as their battle to consolidate their senior status intensifies.
After three defeats in as many games, the Clare SFC roll of honour leaders are facing into a relegation battle alongside Cooraclare and Clondegad with two of the teams to drop down to the intermediate ranks.
There will be no excuses regardless of the outcome, Shams coach Kevin Shalloo outlined. “We have a good old crew working with us and we are definitely going to have a go. There will be no finger-pointing or anything after this. It’s disappointing but we are better than that. We will definitely regroup and have a serious go to save our status. We definitely don’t want to end up getting relegated. It’s going to be tough”.
He added, “There isn’t a team in sport that hasn’t had a day like this. It’s just unfortunate it happened to us today. But look, that’s sport, that’s life, no one died here today – that’s always a positive. We will- we’ll regroup and we’ll pull ourselves together and see if we can make a hand of the next couple of matches. It’s going to be a dog fight but it’s nothing that we are not used to, so we’ll see”.
Losing to St Josephs Doora/Barefield in their final group game was “bitterly disappointing,” he felt. “We had a nice bit of progress made since the first round defeat to Kilmihil. We thought we performed well against Breckans and we were building kind of nicely. We had this kind of targeted that we might pull off something but we were very slow to start and you have to give credit to Doora Barefield, they had our number from the get-go really. They played very, very well and they were convincing winners as the scoreboard suggests – they were that much better than us”.
“When you come in 1-4 to no score you are already climbing the mountain and it’s only at the first water-break and we still had fifteen minutes to play into the breeze. So that kind of made it a little difficult. But we were always kind of hoping that if we chipped away at the score-board that we could put up a big second half. If we could keep it to six or seven, but we didn’t do that. And then we didn’t start the well either. We got 1-8 against Breckans and we felt we’d have to get twelve or fourteen points here today to win but as it turns out we’d have to have got twenty-two or twenty-three to win”.
