Cunningham: It’s all about progressing to the end of June

Yesterday’s game didn’t detain Galway boss Anthony Cunningham too long. They’d won easily, so his focus was already turning to the next day out, a league semi-final against sterner opposition.

“The lads are working very hard,” said Cunningham.

“Today we probably had chances to close out the game and we’ll have to work on those facing Kilkenny. We’ll have to be at our best for Kilkenny, but it’s where you want to be.”

Cunningham said Galway would have learned from the Limerick game, but were 11 points to the good in injury time and far better than their opponents on the day.

“There’s lots to work on, which is always good — you’ll find out more out here against Limerick than you would in training. We work on improving every day we go out, it’s a young, developing team. Their aptitude for work is fantastic.

“We’re happy with where we are but it’s the end of March, it’s all about progressing to the end of June and our big championship game. We’ve Niall Burke back, David Burke, Jonathan Glynn — we want guys to work hard and be very tired at the end of matches, to fight for their places. We had Joe Canning, Damien Hayes, Kevin Hynes coming off the bench, as do a lot of others, a lot of guys are looking for places, which is what you want.”

Then it was back to thoughts of three weeks’ time: “Kilkenny are on a scoring spree every time they’re out, we played them in Kilkenny and it was quite close. We never fear them but we respect them. It’ll probably be in a neutral venue, here in Limerick or Thurles or someplace, but it’ll probably be nip and tuck and it’s winner take all. We’d love to be in a final.”

TJ Ryan was blunt about the game. “We’re very disappointed, the scoreline tells its own story,” said the Limerick manager. “We struggled not so much with the pace of it, but the whole physical side of it against a Division 1A team. We couldn’t cope and a lot of our mistakes were punished.

“We started well, but it was a very poor second-half. We were hurling well early on and we created a couple of half chances for goals, but we didn’t take them. It is more disappointing the fact we didn’t win Division 1B to play in Division 1A next year. Not being used to playing Division 1A teams came home to roost again.”