Long winter lay-off troubles Toome boss

"AH FECK IT, I'll have to hurl again next year now, I thought I'd be retiring after this year."

That was the smiling reaction of Toomevara's sterling full-back Tony Delaney after his side's win over Mount Sion in Sunday's Munster Club hurling final.

On the back of a magnificent late comeback, Tony had every reason to smile, but behind the humour rests a real problem for the GAA.

Having sorted out the National League, the club championship is now the only competition on the very full GAA programme that is not completed in the same calendar year.

Munster champions on November 21, Toomevara will next meet Galway and Connacht kingpins Athenry, but not until mid-February 2005. How does the team manager keep his side on the boil until then, especially over Christmas? That is the challenge facing Sean Hehir, and it's a challenge that leaves him slightly frustrated.

"The next phase is a new competition. How do you manage a team now, take them from winning a Munster championship, to being idle for nearly three months, to playing in an All-Ireland semi-final? You can keep them going alright, but you could kill them too. I have no experience of that, I feel totally inadequate in the situation. We're meeting Athenry, a team well able to gear up for an All-Ireland semi-final and final, past masters at it, but this is something I've never done. I just hope I don't make a mess of it, but I'll be putting an awful lot of thought into it. It is a problem for us, but it's a problem I welcome, because if it wasn't there, it would mean we were gone, and we'd have plenty of time to think about things."

Every cloud has a silver lining however, and one advantage is the long break will give the likes of substitute John O'Brien, former Tipp senior star and scorer of the winning point on Sunday, the opportunity to return to full match fitness after a serious hand injury.

"John will be fit by then. Our panel will be stronger and we'll need to be. We were in trouble in a few places against Mount Sion, in the back line especially, at different times, I'd have liked to see a bit more efficiency. David Young was sick going into the game, he thought he'd get through it, but he didn't. Having said that, Bryan Duff sealed up the half-back line when he came in, but there are still areas we have to work on."

A common refrain after Sunday's pulsating finish was that Toomevara had somehow stolen the game from the Waterford champions; not a sentiment shared by Hehir, whose switches and substitutions played a vital role in turning the tide.

"I wasn't worried at half-time, I felt we were unlucky in the first-half, we didn't deserve to be four points down. Mount Sion had scored only four points from play, the rest were frees conceded by us, frees another referee might not have awarded. That's not to criticise the ref, he's a good referee, he called it as he saw it. But I felt if we could rectify that, we'd come back into the game. I hadn't bargained for the 10 minutes immediately after half-time, when Mount Sion really showed their quality, went a further three points ahead, but even then I didn't think it was gone.

"Mount Sion never dominated us, nor did I expect they would. It was a matter of keeping at it and eventually the chances started to come. I'm not taking any credit for it, that's just the way it happened.

"By the end, I thought we should have won the game a little more comfortably, but we made the same mistakes against Na Piarsaigh (semi-final win over the Cork champions) and left the game hanging. We had dominated Na Piarsaigh in the second-half, like we did in the last quarter against Mount Sion, but with five minutes to go in that game, there was still only four points in it. Against Mount Sion, we hit four wides after we'd levelled the game and had a shot that hit the post.

"Eventually it worked out; we had a job to do, we went the hard way about it, but we got there in the end."

The last word goes to late point-scoring hero John O'Brien.

"You have to feel for Mount Sion; they're a great team, they've been around for a while and won the Munster title a couple of years ago. We haven't won one in a long time, this group of players has lost a few, we wanted it very badly. We took our chance, and hopefully Mount Sion won't begrudge it to us."

Nobody should, but they'll earn their spurs again in February against Athenry.