Limerick boss John Kiely is relishing the opportunity of having another crack at Tipperary in the Munster final.
Despite yesterday’s four-point loss in Thurles, their second of the campaign, Clare’s defeat of Cork allowed the All-Ireland champions to move up to second place in the Munster group behind early season pace-setters Tipp and set up a provincial decider at the Gaelic Grounds on Sunday week.
Kiely said: “It’s great to have an opportunity to go back. In sport you don’t often get the chance two weeks later to go back and right the wrongs, as it were.
“So absolutely, we’re very much looking forward to it in two weeks’ time. We just didn’t feel we were 100% on it today and that seems to be the challenge with that third match in the Munster Championship. It is really, really difficult.
“I have to commend the players, they worked so, so hard during the week even and today obviously in the game to try and overcome that challenge and yeah, there wasn’t an awful lot between the two teams but there’s a few areas for us to work on.
“We learned an awful lot from today’s game.”
After runaway victories against Waterford and Clare, Limerick were much less slick yesterday with several moves out of defence breaking down under pressure from Tipp amid difficult conditions.
“It was a combination of a number of factors even beyond that,” Kiely insisted. “When the team is sharp and you’re on the top of your toes and you’re moving and it’s linking up, those balls always go to hand but give credit to Tipp, yeah, they put a lot of pressure on our ball retention back there and they put in some very good tackling back there.
“At times some of our handpassing weren’t as clean as they might need to be so it’s an area we need to work on now for the next two weeks.”
Kiely played down the fact that he works as school principal in Abbey CBS in Tipperary town ahead of Sunday week.
He added: “Listen, it doesn’t matter where I work. This one, this is all about hurling. I’m a Limerick man and we have Tipp coming to town for the Munster final.
“We need to significantly improve our performance in that final if we’re going to have a cut off it and have a challenge at it so that’s the challenge for us over the next two weeks, to bring a better performance than what we did today.”
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