Five Star performance as Barrowsiders hit Lillywhite’s for five goals in opening round of the Joe McDonagh Cup
A hat-trick of goals from Paddy Boland and a Conor Kehoe goal left the Carlow men with a twenty point lead at the break 4-13 to 0-5 and left some jaws planted firmly on the ground with what they seen, especially after the home sides league results and the opening result against the same opposition left many stunned especially Kildare. Carlow were good for the lead though, they played well, things went very well for the team. The first 10 minutes Kildare played a short game and got caught and Carlow capitalized and punished Kildare.
Kildare had only been beaten once in sixteen games coming into the game last weekend and many would have put them favourites to beat Carlow, but during the league Tom Mullally had blooded some young players to gain them Intercounty experience but last weekend the home side had a very strong team out and put themselves in a very strong position now for the Joe McDonagh cup. Kildare will be extremely disappointed. They came to Netwatch Cullen Park for the league game and left with a fourteen point victory, last weekend the team left with a nineteen point defeat. Carlow will now travel to Kerry this weekend to take on Kerry and they will go there with a burst of confidence after last weekends result.
Speaking on Sunday Scoreline to Shane O’Keeffe, Marty Kavanagh was delighted with the result and in particular Carlows work-rate:
“Like any team you try and get your work rate up to a high level and that’s the basis of any good team, it’s something that we have been driling into ourselves for the last few weeks and if everyone worked hard as a unit hopefully the hurling would take care of itself”.
“We worked very hard yesterday, a few balls spilled to our lads and we converted them into scores. We are delighted to get up and running, the Joe McDonagh is so cut-throat, it’s important to get points on the board early. It was a great start but that’s forgotten about now the focus is now on Kerry next weekend”.
Asked about the score at half time, Shane wanted to know if it was something that Marty expected or were the team pinching themselves?
“I suppose no one could have envisioned we could be that ahead at half time, we were confident about getting the two points and that was our only focus, our only aim, but no one could have foreseen what was going to happen in the first half but it came down to work rate and attitude and the way we applied ourselves and our conversion rate was very good as well, I suppose we were happy at half time with the lead but we needed to keep it up for the second half and see out the game and we did that”.
“We talked about a good bit, the pride of wearing the jersey and like any county player getting to play for their county, the amount of people who would love to be in our position is something that we spoke about as well, we need to be proud of who we are and what were trying to do”.
“It was a really good atmosphere and you could sense it before we even went out, everyone was tuned in to what we had to do, we had a feeling that a good performance was coming and to get the performance we got was very pleasing. We knew Kildare’s short game could hurt us and its something we wanted to nail down very very early, we got two or three lads around them and we overturned them, we got our scores. What we talked about came off and when a performance comes off like that its very pleasing as your working on it in training and to put it to match day is very nice, look its great, we have been in and out of form the last few months hopefully we can get a bit of a crowd behind us now and push on”.
Listen back to the full interview on Scoreline Extra below
