FRESH from a record-equalling fourth All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship success – courtesy of a 0-30 to 2-15 defeat of Kilkenny at a packed Croke Park – Limerick manager John Kiely was a happy camper.
“It feels absolutely fantastic,” he declared on RTÉ Sport. “I really wanted this for the lads. They are an incredible bunch, they have worked so hard together and there’s never ever a night at training where these boys don’t deliver everything they had in the tank.”
“You never know when you are going to get the chances again, you never get a chance like that anyway for certain.
“I would hope our body language at the end would tell you how much we were thrilled with the result.”
Limerick appeared in some bother at half-time, down by three points, but the holders had deliberately opted to play against a stiff breeze in the opening-half, attacking Hill 16.
“It was a phenomenal second half, there’s no two ways about it,” said Kiely. “We’ve had a really strong third quarter all season and it’s amazing the way you take confidence from that.”
Scores flowed in that period, most notably from the likes of Man of the Match Peter Casey, Barry Nash, Diarmaid Byrnes, Gearóid Hegarty, and Aaron Gillane.
In victory, Limerick joined only Cork (1941-1944) and Kilkenny (2006-2009) as four-time champions.
Kiely stated: “We really do put a lot of effort into trying to live in the here and now. If you don’t in sport you’ll take your eye off the ball.”
“You try to depend on your values that you have as a group, your work ethic, your honesty, your trust, that togetherness that is there as a group – those are the things you go to. You don’t go looking at the record that is gone ahead of you. Or what you’ve achieved or what anyone else has. You just concentrate on that, rely on that, as a foundation that you can go at this thing.”
