10 March 2011
Dinny: We are further on this year
Despite two consecutive defeats Antrim hurling manager Dinny Cahill is far from downbeat about Antrim’s performances so far – and he is adamant that Antrim are on the wrong end of too many poor decisions from match officials.
“I know we lost last weekend but in truth we were a lot closer to Laois this year, when a man down, than we were last year with a full team. We started slowly and worked our way back into the game until it was in the balance – and then we got hit with Eddie McCloskey’s red card.
There is no way that Eddie deliberately hit out at his man, he was looking straight ahead and concentrating on his own game. We were shocked by that decision and we do feel that more decisions have gone against us this year than for us.
“We have been hit badly with injuries in early games this year and on the one hand that gives other fellas a chance but when you are missing some key players that has an impact on the team as well. We lost to Clare by a point again but when you analyse the game we performed much better this year than last against them. The last free from which they scored the winning point was a soft free for Clare and in fact should have been an Antrim free.
“But we are not too worried, because there are positive signs there and the league has a long way to go. More players are coming back into the squad too, like Johnny Campbell and Kieran McGourty and hopefully some of the injuries to players like Michael Armstrong, Simon McCrory and Karl McKeegan will begin to clear up.
“We have Carlow this weekend and people should not underestimate Carlow. Their players do their hurling in the Kilkenny intermediate leagues so they are getting good hurling, and we know they ran us very close last year, so we will have to be ready come Sunday.”
