They were streaming out on the lower Cusack Stand.
Was not able to go Sunday but it was a big talking point on the wires. Anyhow⌠Galway people have been most gracious. Their team just started to run out of gas in July.
I heard a few clips. Dodge got very excited but to be honest listening to Mal is akin to waterboarding.
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Itâs almost tragic we missed Liam scream about Liam coming home.
I was watching the game in Gills - there were maroon jersies streaming past from about 69-70 mins
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They should have had Liam doing MC last night. Marty is some dickhead. Apart from being a Clare cunt he almost creamed himself when referencing JP.
It would have meant a lot more to have Liam up there.
80% or more wouldnât have a clu who Aherne was in fairness,
Marty might be a figure of some ridicule here but heâs hugely popular all over the country, homecomings are for the kids
JOHN FOGARTY: No country for old men in modern intercounty hurling
In February, five of the Limerick panel and four of their starters on Sunday â SeĂĄn Finn, Michael Casey, GearĂłid Hegarty, Tom Morrissey and Pat Ryan â won a Fitzgibbon Cup title with UL the day before the county side, without them, travelled to Antrim.
âWe were back training with the UL lads on the Tuesday,â recalled Kiely.
âWe acknowledged their win and we moved on. It wasnât mentioned again until we were coming out of Croke Park because it was one of the major stepping stones for the team this year.â
âIt meant so much to the players that we acknowledged the importance of the Fitzgibbon competition, allowed them to play in the final and stay at home and celebrate with their college mates. They were given the freedom of the city for the night, âgo and do what ye want to do and weâll see ye Tuesday night at trainingâ. Thatâs important. We didnât tell them to be home or not to drink. We told them to go and enjoy themselves.â
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John Kiely seems like a very astute man manager.
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He does. The players seem to love him. There was an interview with Dowling talking about how being a county player was fun again. Few beers after every game players and management, ice creams after training.
It sounds like a sustainable set up.
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The Dow is in the Times today saying that being allowed to eat ice cream after training and drink after matches won them the All Ireland.
This is manna from heaven for club players.
Davy Fitz wont like that.
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All fun and games until somebody gets stabbed in the chest.
Afaik most of it is up to the players themselves, thereâs nothing wrong with a few drinks after a match. If they were all going off having 12 pints, there is a chance that it might hinder recovery for a match the following week.
I think a lot of clubs are trying to move away from âdrinking bansâ now; you just tell the players not to be taking the piss.
No intercounty player wants to have their entire lives controlled; they have to be the ones buying in and trying to make themselves the best player possible. With serious competition for places, that becomes an even bigger factor.
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Limerick have single handed saved hurling
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Downesâ uncle was telling me for the semi final - that Kev was told warm up a few times but then at the end they decided to give Reidy a run out to give him Croke park experience â itâs a small thing but just shows that even tho the game was won and we were in the final he was still thinking of how he could get the most out of the occasion.
My favorite clip so far
Check out @Jess_JCaseyâs Tweet: https://twitter.com/Jess_JCasey/status/1031215441593688065?s=09
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The morning after the night before and Limerick manager John Kiely is making more than a fair shape at encapsulating the enormity of what happened on Sunday in Croke Park into a 25-minute conversation with journalists. Hereâs the guts of it.
Q: Youâve been able to sleep on what was achieved. Has the night helped to reflect on it?
John Kiely: âNot really, no. Ah sure, weâve been through the crappy banquets. Where you have nothing to bring back to the banquet and everybody is very disappointed and itâs a hard occasion.
âItâs a very hard occasion. So it was fantastic to have the real deal last night and have that special occasions where you come into that room with what everybody had come to see. Thatâs why people come to banquets.
âAt the end of the day, there was four tables from my own parish in Galbally. Thatâs a lot, like. Thatâs 40 people who wanted to be there with us and share that occasion. And of course, your family are all there.
âThey know whatâs been put into it. Theyâve heard the door opening at one or two oâclock in the morning when you were heading out into the backyard to look up at the stars and figure out the solution to some problem that you were worried about.
âSo, yeah, it was great to have our family and our club-mates there. Even just for us as a group to sit down together last night and dance it off, if you like.â
Q: How has this position impacted on your day job as principal of Abbey CBS in Tipperary town?
JK: âObviously, it does have an impact. Thereâs no getting away from that, but Iâve huge support from the board of management. The staff is incredible in terms of their support.
âIâve actually only taken off two days in two years, two full days where I actually wasnât in school, so that means youâre there until half four, five oâclock, then youâre gone out the door like a bullet to get to Rathkeale or the Gaelic Grounds.
âItâs just a busy day. Thatâs all. Iâm not the only one in the country thatâs busy. Everyoneâs busy, like.
âItâs just the responsibility, because when you get to training, you have to be on point and in control and everything needs to be⌠people need to know stuff, like. Paul Kinnerk needs to know how many players are there for training so he can design the session around those numbers.
âListen, we managed it quite well this year. We didnât allow the phones to take over. Sometimes, the phones can take over and you can do all your business over the phone.
âSometimes, you might have to just tell people âsorryâ and thatâs it, but listen, weâve done the best we can, but to go back to your question, of course it does have an impact. Some of it is a challenge.
âMost of it is very positive, because young fellas, they see me every day on the corridors, in the classrooms, in the office, out of the pitch.
âFor kids to understand that the teacher they know or knew can be involved in such a special thing, thatâs great for them to figure out: He was a pupil here, he was a teacher here and now heâs lucky enough to go on and do this, so when I say to the lads âif you work hard enough, good things will happenâ they know Iâm coming at that from a viewpoint that stacks up.
âThey know I work hard at it. They know Iâm in there every morning. They know Iâm last in there most evenings.â
Q: How do you make sure this isnât another 1973 and Limerick have to wait again?
JK: âI just wouldnât buy into that at all. That wouldnât even enter my head. I said it after the game yesterday, this is not the end. Itâs the beginning. Itâs a new beginning.
âIâm just so thrilled for all the young kids that are at home this morning with young kids in Limerick, because thatâs the real dividend from this, that spin-off for the thousands of youngsters that are going to go around with hurleys this week, next week and the week after, dreaming of being Cian Lynchs and Shane Dowlings and Peter Caseys and all these guys and not thinking they should be Seamie Callanans or Patrick Horgans or Henry Shefflins, even though theyâre great players.
âThey have their own standards and their own heroes.â
Q: You warned journalists after the semi-final that you would âshut the whole thing downâ as regards media if they contacted players for interviews. Were your words heeded?
JK: âWhat Iâll say about that now is, on a personal level, number one, after the semi-final was a very difficult situation. Youâre being pulled and dragged, left, right and centre, fired into a room full of reporters and Iâm a fighter, so when Iâm put into a corner, I will fight. Thatâs the bottom line.
âI fought that day, because everybody came down off those benches and landed on with their devices (dictaphones) and my instinctive reaction was to fight and protect.
âIâm a protector, Iâm a teacher, Iâm a parent. I wanted to protect the people that mean most to me and I was protecting the Limerick players.â
âThat was my reaction. Thatâs who I am. The people who know me most will know thatâs what my initial reaction will always be, to protect the players. That was why that happened. Iâve no issue with it. I was quite happy with it afterwards. The following day by 11am I had six players who had been individually contacted by various media outlets. So they were confused.
âOnce they pushed back, that was the end of it that day, but it still happened.
âThe bottom line is I know what it is to have my phone on, on a daily basis in school and get 10, 15, 20 phone calls from various outlets and it just takes too much time and itâs hard to make that time and itâs hard to get that much personal energy to invest in all that, so it did help an awful lot that we were left to do what we wanted to do for the three weeks and thatâs continuing to do what we were doing all year: Just go to training, go to work and get on with our preparations.
âWe still enjoyed the build-up as well, you know. My own village at home in Galbally was nuts. I havenât been in the village for very long, Iâve gone down for a haircut or a newspaper or whatever it might be, but Iâm looking forward to going down there tomorrow or the day after and spend a few hours and enjoy what they enjoyed for the last few weeks.â
Q: The county, former players, seemed to be mindful not to haunt this team and show them respect?
JK: âAh yeah, those lads were probably very anxious to pass on the mantle. They were ready to do it in the 80s, they were ready to do it in the 90s, it just didnât happen. Theyâve been great.
âEven last night at the banquet, they were so understated, they were so behind the scenes. Eamonn Grimes (1973 All-Ireland winning captain) spent 10 seconds with me. He was just so happy to have it passed onto Declan (Hannon). They were great, they were incredible. Theyâre incredible men. We would have spoken about it from time to time and the fact that they were just human like us and they managed to do it, so why not? That was it.â
Q: When you took over, what did you feel could be done better?
JK: âWeâve a really strong group of people around us. Paul Kinnerk was key in terms of the hurling coaching side of it, Joe OâConnor in terms of the strength and conditioning. He had only done one year before I came in. Heâs got three years done and you can see that in the players. Heâs top-class, world-class I would say.
âJoe is, exceptional. Brian Geary, Jimmy Quilty, Alan Cunningham all bring their own individual kind of traits to it. Brian brings the experience of 2007 and being a player who was highly regarded, Jimmy Quilty has been on the circuit of clubs and was there in â15 with the U21s and was incredible there. Alan Cunningham, obviously with Na Piarsaigh and Clare, brought great experience. A great cohort of people there straight away.
âThat was the core group, then there was Caroline Currid, who came in and gave us that bit of guidance where we needed it, because she had been through all this before. She knew the map, if you like, so we listened to her guidance.
âThe backroom team as a whole, the standards rose. Itâs all about the standards. Thatâs why we did the boxing because the previous year the standards were allowed to let slip, because fellas werenât challenging enough, whereas this year the standards were set because of the boxing. There was no drop. I donât think there was a single session I went home unhappy about.
âWe tidied up things and took out a few bits that were a burden on fellas. We simplified things, took out a lot of the rubbish that was in there. We simplified things, kept communication to a minimum instead of bombarding these lads with communication. Theyâre only 20, 21, 22.
âKyle Hayes doesnât want 20 texts a day, he just wants to know where he is to be on a Tuesday and a Friday;âthatâs it, boss, leave me aloneâ, so we left him alone.â
âI didnât speak to the players this week on my own. We left them alone. Players need to be left alone. If I ring them, they could spend four or five hours and theyâre thinking about what the conversation was about, so thatâs a whole load of bloody energy wasted. It doesnât need to be done.â
Q: What were the pivotal games of the year for you? The Division 1 semi-final loss to Tipperary after extra-time, even though you were praised for the performance?
JK: âThat was strange, wasnât it? That was strange.
âYeah, we played well, but lost and I was very unhappy with that. I was very unhappy with the message board, if you like, around that.
âWe had played well, but I just didnât like the softness of the mentality of being happy with defeat, because we were in a semi-final and we had qualified out of 1B. I was really unhappy with that. That ground with me a small bit, but, having said that, did it help us going into the championship match in May? Maybe a little. Maybe a little. In a hurling context, the Galway (Division 1B win in Salthill) was big. We didnât acknowledge that during the course of the season but that was a fairly big moment above there. We were, what, eight points down, nine points down?
âHalf-time, the temptation was there to make a few changes and we went into the dressing room with a completely different message. We told the players: âNo, weâre here, youâre eight down, weâre trusting ye 100%, ye can turn this aroundâ, and they took great confidence from that.
âWe didnât panic or we didnât react or we didnât lay blame anywhere. We were just happy to keep going, we stuck to the process, we stuck to the game plan and that was massive.
âThat was massive and it gave the lads great satisfaction to have gotten out of 1B. That just was such a weight off our shoulders. Jesus, it was like a millstone over our back. Eight years.â
Q: A structure change cost Limerick top-flight status too.
JK: âIt did and that was a bit of a bitch too, but you just take it on the chin and get on with it, so just to get out of 1B was a massive, massive thing, a confidence thing and I think the one season that we wanted the system to change in the championship, it came at the right time.
âI knew this championship was designed for us. We had a massive panel of players, young players. Recovery was going to be quick.â
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