Meyler: we weren’t up to the pace of the game

HOW DO you explain this?

After a superb display against Galway last week in the quarter-final win, how do you explain Wexford’s collapse yesterday against their most ancient rivals?

“Look at what ye were writing about them last Monday and Tuesday,” said Kilkenny manager Brian Cody; “Tomorrow now it will probably be something different.”

But it has to be something different, hasn’t it? Because this was certainly something different, from one extreme to the other in a week, leaving Wexford manager John Meyler as baffled as the rest of us.

“We weren’t up to the pace of the game,” was his frank if unhappy assessment. We got a lesson in hurling. Unfortunately it doesn’t look too good at this point in time — that was a serious test today from Kilkenny, and missing Shefflin as well. We have an unmerciful amount of work to do to get up to the pace of their game.

“On the 19th of November, when I met the players (for the first time) you’d probably have said to me, ‘John ye’d be mad to reach a league semi-final’. We’ve achieved something; we haven’t gone backwards, we’ve gone forwards in terms of the last four or five months. We just need now to regroup, look at it, assess it, and see where we go from here. We have Dublin on the 9th of June (Leinster championship), that’s the next game. Kilkenny are the barometer, they’re the test, themselves and Cork, really. We’ll measure up.”

Whistling in the dark? Perhaps, but Brian Cody wasn’t for getting carried away either.

“It can happen like that sometimes in hurling. We got a massive start, a goal very early in the game, a few early scores. That’s the way it goes sometimes in a game, no point in anyone pretending that this is the reality of Kilkenny and Wexford meeting later on in the year, because it’s not.”

Given what happened afterwards, Waterford magnificent win over Cork, would Brian have preferred to have seen a bigger test for his own side?

“Ah no, we’ll take the game as it comes — I’d settle for winning like that any day of the week, to be honest, but it’s only very seldom it happens. The game went away from Wexford very early, but we can only look after our own setup, and the work-rate from our players was good, the commitment was good, and that’s all you can control really.”

That workrate never let up, not even when Kilkenny had built an unassailable lead less than 15 minutes into the second half. Then again, under this manager, you don’t slacken off while you’re wearing that jersey.

With this result yesterday, Offaly’s earlier massive defeat by Limerick in the relegation battle, Dublin’s collapse in the last couple of rounds of the league, the talk now will be back to crisis, crisis in Leinster hurling.

Brian has heard it all before, is tired of it all: “That’s the way hurling goes – there’s no crisis, not in the slightest. If you’re standing on that sideline, taking on any of them any day of the week, it’s different. We just keep things going, ticking over, I’m not in any position nor to I have the ability to solve any crisis. Hurling is hurling, some days you can get strange results; that wasn’t a true reflection of the respective abilities of these two teams.”

Hopefully both John and Brian are right, otherwise in a couple of months’ time it will be a case of Leinster championship, what championship?