‘Tipperary are a top team. It’s going to be a huge challenge’
“It certainly does. We have two points, they have four points. It’s a battle and obviously Tipperary are a top team. It’s going to be a huge challenge for us next Sunday, to take them on. And it does lift the team too when you get a good win like today. If we were facing into it down three games, you know it would be kinda said maybe the heads might be down a small bit from the players. Today should kind of get a bit of confidence in themselves.”
Cody acknowledged that the Fitzgibbon Cup next weekend will deprive the Cats of some players but Kilkenny will “absolutely hand them over” to their colleges.
“It is a strange thing to see big matches, lads committed to big matches with their county and big matches with their colleges.
“The college has to be respected and we’ve been looking after these lads and minding them, like everybody else as well, to be fair.
“They are just disappointed they can’t play with their county as well as the college next weekend, absolutely we will hand them over to the college and we won’t need to see them this week.”
Cody was encouraged by the performance of his younger players in particular.
“Absolutely, because if you look at the team, there is an awful lot of new players out there. We had very little experience in the team for the last few matches and if the young fellas weren’t bedding in, we wouldn’t be competitive at all.
“The new-style championship ... first of all, we are trying to progress in the league. The championship is going to be similar to the league in lots of ways, just go out and play every Sunday and to do that, you are going to have a strong panel and injuries will play a part in that. But from our panel our players are exposed to serious games.”
Waterford manager Derek McGrath acknowledged his side are in danger of dropping to Division 1B.
“We’re in deep trouble regarding relegation, there’s no doubt about that. I’ve been saying we’re following a process, but we targeted a big performance today, there’s no way around that or dressing it up in terms of the intensity we hoped to bring to the game.
“You’re trying to strike a balance between confidence-sapping defeats and ensuring you follow the process. We’ve followed the process up to this — DJ Foran came in and did relatively well, Patrick Curran came in and did relatively well, Colin Dunford came in... you can see you’re following the process but you want to get those wins as much as possible.
“In terms of what we said the last two weeks, it was about meeting Kilkenny head on, and we didn’t do that.”
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