League champions Galway beat All-Ireland champions by four points in UMPC Nowlan Park on Saturday in round two of the Camogie League
When these two teams meet they bring out the best in each other, both teams came into this game having suffered defeat in their first-round games as Clare beat Kilkenny and Tipp beat Galway. With the faith of their league campaign on the line whoever lost this game would certainly find it difficult to qualify for the latter stages of the league. Speaking to Martin Quilty after the game Dowling said:-
“Disappointed to lose especially at home in UPMC Nowlan Park and I thought when Julieann got the goal we were in a great position but we never kicked on. I said to the girls after the game it’s still early in the year, we obviously want to win league games, and the loss probably puts us out of the league now, we have three league games to go and we’re going to try to improve, there was a huge improvement on last week, we got some great scores but we gave away a lot of scores too, Galway got a lot of frees in the second half – some of them very harsh I thought myself:- Galway are a great team, we know that and anytime we play them we have to be at our best and we probably weren’t for the last 10-15 minutes and they punished us like the great team they are”.
“We haven’t done much hurling done, we’re disappointed that we made mistakes but we have to be realistic as well at this time of the year it’s very hard to get hurling done you’re trying to balance things, this week we had one session on Wednesday – the girls had a tough game on Sunday and training session on Wednesday were trying to get as much hurling into them as we can but you can’t just turn on a switch and your touch is going to be brilliant right away”.
“We have to get the timing right, it’s going to be a long year yet we have Leinster Championship and we have an All-Ireland series, we’re not going to panic obviously, we’d like to stay in the league as long as we can but with the structure now you have to be in the top two and we are probably gone out of that now, it’s just about been competitive now and trying to get as many wins as we can”.
You can listen back to the game in full on BIG Game Live at the link below
