Kildare minor hurling manager reacts to heavy Offaly defeat

Kildare minors suffered a heavy defeat, 3-23 to 0-8, against Offaly in the Electric Ireland Minor Hurling Championship. This Offaly side is expected to go far in this year's championship and Kildare's joint managers Noel Ryan and Mark Moloney were remaining positive after this tough result.

Noel Ryan said after the game “we did our homework on Offaly and we knew they were a serious outfit and this side would go a long way. They were a well oiled machine there today but we were disappointed with how we performed as good as Offaly were. We felt we could have been a lot better and mastery of the basics let us down.”

The manager added that we got blocked down a lot, maybe not carrying the ball aggressively enough but listen we will take lessons from it and move on to Laois in two weeks.

“We had to tell the lads after the game that sometimes you will run into teams that are very impressive and you might be under the cosh and it is how you react to it. But look, we have training on Monday, we have to pick our heads up and look a lot of these are 16 or 17 years old so they’re resilient and they shake off things fairly quickly."

“We’ll be able to take a lot from that and look at where we can improve for the next day. After a game like that you have to look where we can make those marginal gains and we have an awful lot to work with and improve on. We have to not dwell too much on it and the thing is with younger players they can shake off days like today.”