Faithful eye revenge over Cork, warns Carroll

LEST it has slipped everyone’s notice, in the week of the Munster senior football final, the Leinster senior hurling final, and a host of first-round football qualifiers, there’s also a big game going on in Tullamore on Saturday: a do-or-die All-Ireland qualifier game for the senior hurlers of Cork and Offaly.

Offaly having lost to Wexford in their first game, who subsequently lost to Dublin. Cork put up a strong challenge before going under to Tipperary in Munster, and the Rebels are strongly fancied in most quarters, a fact accepted even by Offaly forward Brian Carroll.

“You can’t blame people, Cork have a super team at the moment. We were hugely disappointing against Wexford, we didn’t perform on the day, gave away a couple of soft goals. We seemed to be doing alright at times but we were not clinical enough and failed to score a couple of penalties. Cork ran Tipp close so as far as the public are concerned, they are 10 points a better team than us. We would be hopeful that getting them at home, we are going to give them a rattle at least.”