Fresh blood can revive Limerick, says Nickie Quaid

Nickie Quaid says Limerick’s All-Ireland-winning U21s have brought “freshness and ability” to the senior set-up.

Manager TJ Ryan is likely to give debuts to several of those youngsters this Sunday against Tipperary and Quaid has high praise for the newcomers.

“It’s not easy to blend a lot of new young lads in with a lot of older lads, but I think they’ve settled in well. They’ve really added to the whole thing in terms of freshness, energy, and ability. Fellas that are senior then have welcomed them in. It doesn’t just happen overnight.

“The league might have settled these lads in, integrate them into the senior set-up. Hopefully, in championship we’ll see that come to fruition.”

Limerick had a disappointing league, admits.

“At the start of the league, promotion was what we were looking for. Going in then, it was disappointing we couldn’t come away with the win [against Clare]. We reassessed, looked at doing what Waterford did last year, and get to a league final and try and win it.

“In Limerick, things are never as good as they’re made out to be and they’re never as bad as they’re made out to be. We’re not looking for outside motivation. We’re looking to keep things in-house, concentrate on ourselves, and keep our own house in order. We’re all looking at ourselves first, before we look at anyone else, control what we can control individually and then bring it together. That will help get our own performance in order.”

Will that performance include a sweeper, an approach that didn’t work well against Waterford in the league semi-final?

“We played it against Dublin and it worked, obviously, we got the win. We felt that it was the way to go against Waterford. We knew they wouldn’t have a whole pile of forwards, they would retreat out the field a bit and that we might make better use of our players by crowding the middle, we might have better strikers from out the field.

“I thought it was working for the first half. Then a couple of errors, they got on top. Maybe, it was the familiarity, because they’ve had it [system] for the last year or two. When push came to shove, we might have reverted to type, played into their hand. It’s hard to know. I can’t put my finger on exactly what happened in the second half. It definitely didn’t help that we didn’t have a massive amount of work done on that system.”

For Quaid, aesthetics don’t come into it.

“Is it [the sweeper system) for the better of the game or worse? When you win, you don’t care. It’s the business end of things. It’s a results game at this level. We don’t care what way we’re playing once we’re getting the results, but I still think we’ll get a lot of entertaining games, even if teams are playing systems.”

Those systems challenge a keeper with his restarts.

“If there’s a sweeper, there might be options short, but if you go long, there’s an extra body back there as well. It’s harder than when it was 15 on 15, when everyone was marked, you just had to hit the ball long, to get it as far away from you as possible. There’s pros and cons. You can have a handy ball out to a back. You’re not going to win every puck-out, no matter who you’re playing. You’re just looking to get over the average. Then you’ll have more possession. Every keeper is going to work on puck-outs. It’s a massive part. You take the bones of 30 puck-outs every game.”

The stakes are high, he adds: “There is no room for error at this level. If you’re doubting yourself, you shouldn’t be there. You have to back yourself.”