RONAN SHEEHAN’S Down side will have to throw out the form book if they’re to advance to the All-Ireland Minor B Hurling Championship final for the first time in the history of the competition.
Standing in their way in Saturday’s semi-final at Newbridge are a Kerry side going for their fourth title in succession, following a comprehensive 2-19 to 0-13 defeat of Kildare in the last eight.
Sheehan, now in his second year in charge, reports that preparations have gone smoothly despite an unfavourable stadium switch from Páirc Esler to the Sarsfields venue.
“We had good preparation in our quarter-final against Donegal. We’re slightly disappointed that the venue has changed at the last minute - it was originally fixed for Newry and is now fixed for Newbridge so that’s disappointing to a degree but it’s only fair it’s a neutral venue with the distances involved.”
The Newry Shamrocks clubman added: “We’ve had no injury worries with exception of Mark Fisher. We’ve got Liam Savage back from holidays, we’ve got Daithi Sands who missed the Antrim match due to holidays back as well so we’re more or less at full strength and we’re looking forward to the challenge.”
While the Kingdom is perceived as a football county, hurling is the dominant code in parts of North Kerry, and recent strides in coaching have translated into progress at underage level.
“Clearly Kerry hurling’s on a bit of an up at the moment in terms of winning the Christy Ring Cup, winning promotion into Division 1B and they’re going for four in-a-row here.”
“We won two U16 All-Irelands back-to-back but it’s worth noting Kerry don’t compete in that, so we don’t really know anything about them and they probably don’t know an awful lot about us either to be honest.”
Sheehan acknowledges Down come into the penultimate stage of the ‘B’ tournament relatively untested – they recorded a facile 3-17 to 4-3 victory over Donegal in the quarter-final of the eight-team competition.
“I think its hard to read too much into [the match against] Donegal to be honest because we were never really losing that game - we were always in control of it but I think it was good for our confidence levels to run up a big score.”
However, Sheehan perceives today’s match against Kerry as a more opportune chance for redemption after a disappointing Ulster Minor Championship semi-final defeat to Antrim.
“We’ve got some good players, Ronan Beattie, Cormac Coulter, Daithi Sands and Jordan Murphy are all very good scoring forwards. Liam Savage is Gary Savage’s son, Gazza used to play for Down for years and like father like son, Liam’s a fine hurler at centre-back back for us as well.
“We have a good team, there’s no doubt about that, we’d be keen to be atone for what we believe would be an under-performance against Antrim in the Ulster Championship.
“We’d be disappointed about how we performed - not necessarily with losing to Antrim because I think Antrim should always beat us given the different in the number of clubs but we’d be disappointed with the margin of defeat.”
