Kilkenny beat Tipperary 0-14 to 0-13 in the Very National Camogie League in Piltown GAA on Saturday afternoon last
In what is probably a poor league by their standards Kilkenny recorded their second win of the campaign at the weekend when they beat Tipperary in Piltown to finish off the league on a positive note.
Tipperary had been favorite to win the game before throw in a potentially book a place in this year’s final, Kilkenny were looking to get a good performance after the destruction of Cork the week previous weekend. Both managers made changes before throw in, putting out strong teams to contest this league game. A win or draw would have guaranteed Tipp a spot in this year’s League Final, and defeat for Kilkenny would have seen the All-Ireland champions only win one of their five games.
The sides were fairly evenly matched going in at half time with the Kittens just one point ahead 0-5 to 0-4. Denise Gaule was back for the game at the weekend and she would play a pivotal role in the game. Tipperary took a foothold in the second half of the game by the 41st minute and had a two-point lead. Coming into the closing stages of the game the teams were level at 0-12 each and time was running out, Eimear Heffernan put the visitors a point ahead with 62 minutes on the clock, Denise Gaule stepped up twice in the space of two minutes to ensure victory for Kilkenny.
Speaking to Martin Quilty after the game, Dowling was happy with the win:- “I wouldn’t say it was a great performance, but it was heart and determination and that’s what we wanted today was to fight and fight and that’s probably what we haven’t done in the last couple of matches, I’m sure people have been writing us off usual with the last couple of weeks but I knew these girls had fight”.
“Training went really well before the Cork game for two weeks and I just couldn’t understand that performance last week, the simple things were going wrong but today it was about going back to basics and getting the simple things right and I thought we did that. The game was gone away from us early in the second half but to be fair to the girls they plugged away and we got the win in the end, it was brilliant”.
“I don’t ever doubt these girls, I know last week didn’t go well when you look back on our first game against Clare we hadn’t much training done and I still felt we should have won that game. The Galway game I know we lost but I felt we really put it up to them”.
“The only real disappointment was the Cork game last week and I thought we started very well the first 10-15 minutes but we just let Cork run away from us then and it was very disappointing. We just said on Wednesday night we were back to basics and just try to get the simple things right and It all comes back to work rate”.
“Anything we ever won in the past it was all done to our work rate and attitude. I’m delighted our subs came in a made a huge difference, Ciara Phelan, Aoife Prendergast, and Ciara O’Keeffe hadn’t seen any minutes all year and she came in and won two frees for us. It doesn’t mean much to where we are in the table its just for the group to get a victory, we have a break now and we’re going to train flat out and get ready for the championship”.
You can listen back to Brian’s full interview at the link below
