Limerick starlet Dowling frustrated by supporters’ negativity

Shane Dowling has blasted the Limerick public for not getting behind John Allen’s hurlers.

The rising star was livid with the negative attitude of the county’s supporters towards the team both before and after last month’s narrow Munster quarter-final defeat to Tipperary.

Stating it was his personal opinion and not the camp’s, Dowling said: “Personally, this is my first year in the senior panel and I was very disappointed with the Limerick public. Some of the stuff that you’re being told or hearing or seeing, it didn’t make any difference to us but it was just disappointing to see and to hear.”

Dowling revealed he had been told by an individual in the county after the game that Limerick’s trip to Thurles was a futile one. “As someone said to me: ‘It must have been an awful feeling going up knowing you were going to get a trimming’. Why do you have to listen to this? We knew we weren’t going to get a trimming.” Dowling recalled how he responded to the remark sarcastically.

“You just say ‘yeah, we have no chance’ back to them. Or if they’re questioning your fitness and then they say: ‘How do you think you’ll do against Tipp?’ you just say, ‘Yeah, we can’t win’. Then they’ll change their attitude.”

He added: “If I’d been 25 or 26 and listening to this for the last five or six years you’d be saying, ‘Why do you bother?’ We’re amateur guys trying our best. Don’t get me wrong. There was a decent turnout in Thurles. But how many of those people were going up saying, ‘We have a real chance?’ I don’t know.”

Dowling was also disheartened by what he heard had been written about the team on internet forums.

“Maybe it’s just my inexperience coming in the first year but even these kind of online forums, thank God I don’t go near them but some of the stuff that I do hear is ridiculous. People behind keyboards writing stuff about you, it’s ridiculous. You just ask for patience. It’s a learning curve and maybe in another two or three years if nothing happens then maybe it’s time to start talking.”

Meanwhile, Antrim manager Jerry Wallace sensationally revealed he approached referee Anthony Stapleton and RTÉ about getting Cormac Donnelly off an expected ban. Donnelly picked up an eight-week suspension arising from an on-field incident in last month’s Leinster SHC defeat to Antrim when he was sent to the stands. Wallace admitted he asked Stapleton to consider his report as well as unsuccessfully requesting RTÉ not to send the video of the game to Croke Park and contacting The Sunday Game panellists to convince them to “deflate” the significance of the incident.