Nobody saw the result coming.
Having watched Kilkenny’s senior footballers make good gains in the British Junior Championship last year, things were starting to look up for the continued development of football in Kilkenny.
Ref finally blows full time in Nowlan Pk Leinster minor football championship Wexford 17-20 Kilkenny 0-0
— Wexford GAA (@OfficialWexGAA) April 16, 2016
In our preview ahead of the weekend, Michael O’Leary wrote that ‘a respectable performance and scoreline is what they would be at least hoping for’. Having been away from the minor championship for a few years, Kilkenny made their return on Saturday afternoon at Nowlan Park, but nobody could have predicted the scoreline that would follow after sixty minutes.
To put the final result into context, the half time score also made for sorry reading.
Half time Nowlan Pk Leinster minor football championship Wexford 6-13, Kilkenny 0-0
— Wexford GAA (@OfficialWexGAA) April 16, 2016
Ned Quinn, chairman of Kilkenny County Board joined John Masterson on KCLR Live on Monday morning to address the 17-20 to no score a single point defeat at the hands of Wexford.
“I would like to say two things first of all. As chairman of the county board, I have overall responsibility for all of our county teams so I accept my responsibilities as regards our minor football team as I do with any other team.
The second thing I would like to say, with the aid of hindsight, is to express very much regret that the young players who represented our county and were more than willing to represent their county last Saturday suffered the defeat that they did and I will apologise to them for what happened to them during the game on Saturday.
In the lead up to the game, by our own standards preparations had gone well, nobody envisaged what was about to happen but it did happen on the day and I would apologise to everybody for that.
I will say in the GAA in Kilkenny that over the years we’ve got a lot of things right. We have never been able to get football to where we’d like to get it to and we will have to deal with this issues [as a matter of] starting tomorrow night when we will have an executive meeting of the management committee of the county board.
Quinn suggests the problems with football in Kilkenny run much deeper than just the match at the weekend. Having addressed the result at the weekend, the conversation turned to development squads, the future plan for football and what comes next.
Click play above to listen to the full interview.
