It wasn’t to be for Galway and Henry Shefflin in Croke Park on Saturday night as they failed to get the better of a dogged Kilkenny team in the Leinster final.
It was an uncharacteristically flat performance from the Tribesmen under the Ballyhale Shamrocks clubman’s stewardship following an unbeaten round robin campaign leading up to the provincial decider.
Following the game, the ten-time All-Ireland winner reflected on his team’s under performance and criticised the quality of the game.
Shefflin exclaimed: “It was a very poor game. Obviously, Kilkenny are going to be delighted but for the neutral watching that game, it wasn’t great. However, there was no pattern of play or structure to the game from our point of view.
“We didn’t see this one coming because we felt like we had good momentum before this game. We topped the group in Leinster and were undefeated. We could easily have won all of our games. Our training has been really good over the last couple of weeks so we felt that we would get a good performance, but that didn’t happen.
“We were off it on the ball and we were off it off the ball. There was no flow at all and we weren’t at it. Our tackling was poor and we gave the referee the opportunity to give them frees which TJ too advantage of.
“There were a few dubious calls but I don’t think had any bearing on the final result.
“If we perform like that in an All-Ireland quarter-final we won’t win. It’s as simple as that really. We will get back on the field and go again.
“We’re not going to be able to change that much in the next two weeks in terms of what we are doing. The only thing we can change is personnel. We’ll have a look at things and go again.”
You can listen back to the full interview on Scoreline Extra here.
