Despite the disappointment of taking taking the Walsh Cup back across the Shannon, Galway manager Micheál Donoghue was in a relatively optimistic mood in his post-match discussions in Nowlan Park on Sunday.
Moments earlier, Donoghue had seen Kilkenny’s Richie Hogan lift the Born na Móna Walsh Cup as Kilkenny secured a 0-20 to 0-18 victory, with Hogan himself pocketing over half of Kilkenny’s scores.
“It’s disappointing to lose,”, says Donoghue. “It’s one of three competitions you can win.”
“At the outset, we looked to progress as far as we [could] with it and our objective for the whole competition was to try and unearth a few new players, with younger fellas.”
“We’ve looked at 33 or 34 players in the course of the Walsh Cup. Because we progressed to the latter stages, we gave a few of the lads who were injured an opportunity to come back and get some game time so overall it’s been worthwhile for us.”
“We were fortunate today to be able to come down to Kilkenny, it was a great challenge for us, a great experience for the young fellas and hopefully a good platform for the National League.”
On reflection, the free-taking on Sunday may be one of the disappointments for Galway. Had they converted their free chances alone, the scoreline at the end may well have been in favour of the Tribesmen.
“Jayo (Jason Flynn) overall probably had an off-day on it. We created one or two good goal chances. When you come down here against any of the big teams, you need to be taking those chances and we didn’t today.”
“Overall, there’s a lot of positives for us out of the Walsh Cup and we’re looking forward to the National League.”
Galway open their Division 1B campaign against Offaly in O’Connor Park (Tullamore) on Sunday at 1pm, with Kilkenny getting their Division 1A campaign underway against Waterford in Nowlan Park at 2pm.
Photo By Seaninryan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
