Gerry O’Connor was happy with the win but not the performance as his and Donal Moloney’s reign as Joint Managers of the Clare senior hurlers got off to a winning start.
They had a 2-24 1-15 win over Kerry in Tralee which was their first outing of the year. The Killanena native felt that areas of their play which they worked on during training failed to materialise once the sliotar was thrown in by Jason Mullins.
“A lot of the stuff that Donal Óg Cusack, Liam Cronin and Kieran Corcoran had been working on on the training field didn’t really transfer as well as we would have hoped. Maybe that’s because we’ve been training at UL. It’s probably an unrealistic surface, when you transfer on to a grass pitch like we did today.”
O’Connor feels Clare didn’t cope too well when Kerry deployed a sweeper. “We started really well, contained them against the breeze and then we struggled with their short puck-out game. They dropped in a sweeper and we struggled a little bit with that”.
He added “Then, in the middle of the second half, they seemed to get a few injuries and went even more defensive. We attempted to change things slightly. We got some feedback from our stats guys and we started to go much more direct and much longer”.
Next up for O’Connor and Moloney is a home tie in Sixmilebridge on Wednesday when they host a Limerick outfit smarting from a twenty one point defeat against Cork.