Ciaran Carey “Limerick’s Performance Just What The Doctor Ordered”

There’s a cliche out there: “Just what the doctor ordered” and that was it Sunday. What a performance and what a way to bounce back from the first defeat and to be fair to the players, every player knows individually whether they are club or county when they have underperformed.

I know that team would have rallied together and sized up where they went wrong and addressed that because they were a different animal in Walsh Park and looked the Limerick of old from start to finish.

What sticks out and stands apart for me was the work rate from the six forwards. I saw a lot of it during the League campaign and it was ferocious on Sunday. There aren’t too many Waterford players that did themselves justice yesterday, maybe Conor Prunty for one but the work rate of the Limerick forwards was just savage and in fairness, Cian Lynch and William O’Donoghue also worked extremely hard so they made their defenders job that bit easy and a small bit more comfortable for them on the day.

As for Waterford, they scored 0-5 from free and 0-5 from play and looking at Waterford from this year versus last year, Derek McGrath might have outstayed his welcome slightly but last year Waterford were competitive, but haven’t won any championship games since 2017 so it is obvious that the wheels are coming off down there.

It isn’t nice for any county to go through that and for me the body language there especially from Austin Gleeson, (he was only young player of the year and player of the year only three years ago), to go from that to what I saw last Sunday.

I just never saw such body language and disinterest from an intercounty player like that so obviously there are severe problems down there and those problems do point towards Waterford’s management team.

But at the same time, it wasn’t too long ago that Limerick faced similar problems so from Waterford’s point of view it can’t get any worse down there. At the end of the day, Limerick didn’t really buy into that, they probably knew that they were playing a bit of a fragile and wounded Waterford team however Limerick still went about their business in a hugely professional way.

Kyle Hayes for me was super on the day for me and the five subs that came on all contributed, seeing Shane Dowling score two massive free and walk away like it was all bread and butter stuff was just fantastic. Limerick needed that momentum all around because next week will be massive for the two counties.

You’ll always give yourself a chance once the attitude is right, and when the attitude is right everything will fall into shape in chronological order.

As the man says: “Job well done, congratulations to everybody involved especially the management team and the players because they obviously did some self-diagnoses because there was some massive improvement.

Special mention also to the minors who put in another solid performance at the weekend without getting the win. Still and all, two draws keeps them right in the hunt for progression out of the group and like their Senior counterparts, next weekend is going to be huge.