Despite Sunday’s Munster quarter-final being a home tie for Limerick, their manager John Brudair still has a sense that they are going into the unknown with his young panel of players.
More than half of Brudair’s twenty six man panel have arrived on the inter-county scene in the last two years. He said “We will be going into the unknown with a lot of the younger lads, we’ll have a lot of experienced lads still to call on who’ve played in Munster Finals over the last ten years so it’s just hopefully to get that balance right and again to give Clare a right good go”.
Limerick’s Allianz National Football League campaign ended rather disappointingly as they lost their final six games in the competition including a six point defeat against Clare. The Treaty boss is hoping his players will take the lessons learnt from the League into Championship.
“I suppose in terms of the team itself in terms of championship in that we’re using a lot of younger players this year and they’re going to have to experience the fervour of a championship night, we’d be hoping they’ll respond well and what they’ve learnt over the League will stand to them in good stead when it comes to playing Clare”.
On Sunday’s opponents, Brudair who is in his third year in charge feels that Clare’s settled team will help them but he is eager to atone for their League defeat.
“They’ve a settled for the last two or three years, nearly every day you see the Clare team being named now they’re pulling from the same twenty, twenty one players which gives you that consistency of performance. The one thing about that then is you do get to know them fairly well and we’ve played them two or three times over the last twelve months so we know what to expect from them but knowing and dealing with it are two different things and we just have to make sure we bring our A-game and if we do there won’t be much in it, there wasn’t much in it last year we played them twice, won one, lost one. This year we’ve lost one so we need to get the win again this year to make sure to balance the books”.
Kerry await the winners of Sunday’s tie and a chance to play the Kingdom would be a massive learning curve for Limerick. “Anytime that a Limerick team gets the opportunity to play I suppose the royals of Irish football, it must be a great feeling to go out and play against Kerry, Munster Championship you couldn’t ask for anything more especially again for the experience of those younger lads to go through the idea of playing a team that’s regularly been in All-Ireland finals for the last ten years, you couldn’t look for anything better”.
Brudair knows what it takes to defeat Clare teams. He was manager of the Milford Senior Camogie team that defeated Newmarket-on-Fergus in last year’s Munster Final. A positive environment in the training ground is associated with winning teams and he has been very impressed with the mood at training.
”What we can say is that the attitude in training for the last month has been outstanding. Everybody looks forward to championship, it’s what we are bred on in the GAA – everyone looks forward to championship and that’s the way it is for Sunday and all we are hoping for is that all the hard work of the last six or seven months comes to fruition”.
The Dromcollogher-Broadford man became the first native Limerick manager since Dave Quirke who was boss until 1997 when he succeeded Maurice Horan in 2013. According to Brudair people outside the camp are not expecting much from the two-time All-Ireland Champions but inside the setup confidence is growing.
“There’s definitely the unknown factor with us, you just don’t know how young lads of nineteen or twenty are going to respond to Championship, they could explode and it would be great if they did, if it happens we’ll be delighted as a management team and as a squad but we just have to be patient with them, they’re learning their trade and in fairness the older lads on the team have been brilliant in terms of bringing them along so we need that combination of experience and youthful exuberance to make sure we cause an upset. No one is expecting it of us, we’re only expecting it of ourselves.