A glorious opportunity to see how far Limerick have come

On the day Dublin played Waterford in the relegation final in Walsh Park in 2014, we still had four minutes before we had to leave the dressing room when I walked out the door. “I’ve enough said,” I told the players. “I’m going.” I high-tailed, banged the door and was gone.

The players had their say before Michael Carruth, the 1992 Olympic boxing gold medallist, had the final word. A couple of weeks earlier, Jose Mourinho got the Chelsea masseur Billy McCulloch to give the pre-match team-talk before their 1-0 victory against Man City. I didn’t know who the hell Billy McCulloch was but I was sure that Carruth — who was working with Dublin as a masseur — had a lot more to offer than McCulloch.

We clipped Waterford in that game to stay up. We were all wired but that performance was about more than survival. We’d had a good year in 2013, which we wanted to back up. Waterford had beaten us earlier in the league and we wanted payback. And we also wanted to put down a marker to Waterford in case we met them again later in that 2014 season.