Baker miffed by ref justice

Man can’t live on moral victories alone but Ollie Baker found some sustenance in the performance of his players in defeat.

Yet he was more than a little bit miffed by some of the decisions made by referee Alan Kelly.

“The amount of scores they got from frees was cruel — eight scores from frees in the first half out of 11.

“We weren’t getting the same amount at the other end. Those are crucial things to give players belief and confidence in the game and it didn’t work out for us.

“Ultimately, I thought the referee could have allowed a more open match seeing as it was Championship hurling.

“There wasn’t a dirty stroke in the match, yet there were seven or eight fellas yellow carded.”

Baker might want to look at the couple of incidents involving Cathal Parlon in the first half but in the main he was full of pride for the manner in which his Offaly players acquitted themselves after they had been dismissed as also-rans prior to the game.

“They prepare every bit as much as what Kilkenny, Cork, Tipperary, Galway do. They sacrifice as much as every other team in the country.

“I wasn’t insulted beforehand, we were written off, but it was nearly an attitude of, ‘Sure why bother turning up?’ and that’s very insulting to the amount of commitment and sacrifice that these players have made.

“They’ve put their lives on hold effectively for the last seven or eight months and that’s a huge amount. There was a huge prize here today to play Kilkenny, a huge opportunity. We didn’t look at it any other way.”

The last team to score four goals against Kilkenny was Tipperary in the 2010 All-Ireland final, which they won.

Baker, who revealed part of their tactics was to keep the ball away from the Kilkenny half-back line, took solace from the chances his forwards took.

“The guys we have inside our full-forward line are goalscorers. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be going for goals every time you go in. Goals win matches as they say to you. Four goals give you 12 points, you’d want an awful lot of accurate shooting if you were going to get 12 points against Kilkenny if you kept on going for it.

“But getting the ball in there was the tactic today and it worked to a certain degree.”

He added: “I think an awful lot of other teams... there’s maybe a few weaknesses in them after today. We scored four goals, we didn’t concede any goals. If you’d offered me that at the start of the game I’d have bit your hand off.”