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*Kilmaley defender, Colin McGuane. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill.
ARRIVAL of the Clare SHC quarter-finals leaves teams involved “in for a real treat” according to Kilmaley’s manager.
Topping the group can sometimes be an advantage for teams but getting paired against Clonlara has brought no real reward for Kilmaley, manager Brian Culbert maintained.
He outlined, “The aim for every team is to get out of the group at all so for us to get out is great. Normally it’s a bonus to top the group and avoid the other group winners but the way this championship is going and the way the draw just went, it’s definitely not an advantage to draw Clonlara who won it only a few years ago”.
Consistency is the big focus for Kilmaley, Culbert stressed. “It is what it is though and we’re excited about taking n that challenge which will be a big test for our lads again. The main thing right now for Kilmaley is consistency and bar that Conor McGrath wonder point a few years back, they’ve been consistently getting out of the group and into quarter-finals which is the first step is getting where they want to get to”.
Successive wins over Newmarket-on-Fergus, Wolfe Tones and his native Sixmilebridge saw Culbert’s Kilmaley finish top of Group 4. “To be honest, Sixmilebridge were the better team in the first half and you could see that there was a level of aggression in them that took us time to get to grips with. We just had to stay in the game really and managed to just get in front by the break. The good thing was that we could just concentrate on our own game and didn’t have to depend on other results which was an advantage. The ‘Bridge had to look at their phones and keep an eye on the other game whereas at half-time we were just concentrating on our performance and try to get a better second half out of it. And the boys did respond and we quickly got scores on the board in the second half to put some daylight between us. We’re glad to have gotten that run on them and push seven or eight clear because if we hadn’t, it would have been very nervy at the end there.
“Look, it has just been so frenetic this weekend with results and score difference and all the rest that I haven’t fully had time to soak it all in but certainly if we got as exciting a weekend’s hurling as we did this weekend, we’re in for a real treat for the quarter-finals,” he told The Clare Echo.
