'We didn't perform anywhere near our capabilities'- Laois U-20 manager Damien Carter

Wednesday evening saw Laois and Offaly square off in the quarter-finals of the U-20 Leinster Hurling Championship in what was a repeat of the 2022 Minor final. 10 lads from both teams started that day in May 2022 and on Wednesday evening so the large crowd inside O'Connor Park expected a good contest.

Offaly ended up putting Laois to the sword and won by 16 points in the end to end Laois' participation in the championship.

Laois manager Damien Carter spoke after the game and credited the Offaly team for their performance.

"It was a very tough night, just very disappointing, I suppose, that we didn't perform anywhere near our capabilities. We’d a small kickback at the start of the second half and we were hoping we would have been able to kick on but they're an excellent team in fairness to them. They have some really good hurlers and they punished us at key times and we just couldn't recover from it and unfortunately that was the outcome of it," he said.

Offaly's start was impressive to say the least as they raised eight white flags in the first nine minutes with Laois' only score coming courtesy of Jer Quinlan.

"They just smothered us there in the first seven or eight minutes and it just seemed to me that anything they hit was going over as well so it seemed to me it was going to be one of them nights and we had to kind of, you know, try and get our first score and try to steady lads as quickly as possible but they don't let the foot off at all in fairness to them when they got on top," Carter said.

Leo O'Connor's team were excellent all over the pitch but Laois did manage to find the Offaly net twice courtesy of Cormac Byrne but that small spell of scoring didn't last long as Offaly just kept firing over score after score.

"They kept it on top of us and they really killed us off and, you know, it was probably game over at half time but in fairness to the lads, the first 10/15 minutes of the second half, there was a bit of fight in them and a bit of character shown there but, as you can see, the more we kind of tried to push on, the gaps were open, left behind there and they picked off some easy points there in the second half as well.

"The goals were a big help. Cormac Byrne, he was excellent there today, 2-1 I think he finished up with and, you know, that's his first year up out of minor but we were kind of coming here today and we were saying to be any way competitive at all we'd probably need to be hitting the net three or four times but It didn't happen unfortunately," he said.

Carter ended being shown a red card in the second-half for his reaction to the referee's decision to award a free to Offaly. The Laois manager felt that Offaly were being given the frees a lot easier than his side.

"I had a few choice words for the ref there as well but it seemed to be very soft now and I'm obviously looking at it from a biased point of view but at one stage the free count there was 15-3 or something or 15-4 in the first half and, you know, Screeney can't be touched and he's gone over and he's getting fouls but that's just the joys of it, we weren't happy with it but what can we do," Carter said.

Laois found if difficult to create scoring chances with Offaly having Laois' main threats marked tightly at all times. Carter felt that Offaly just had the better quality of ball going into their forwards as opposed to the balls going into the O'Moore County's forwards. 

"We needed a good quality ball going into Jer and we needed Jer to be on top of his game and, you know, it's very hard when there's two lads kind of hanging out with him. They had their homework done and if you look back at some of the games that they played and some of the games that we played, the systems are actually very similar. Two very similar styles but just their quality of ball going into the likes of Screeney and Egan in the other corner was a lot better than the quality of ball going into our corner-forwards," he said.

Looking back on the U-20's journey in Leinster, they put in a good first-half display against Kilkenny where soft goals led them to victory before securing a draw away to Wexford. That set them up with a preliminary quarter-final against Kildare which they won to set up the Offaly clash.

"You're kind of weighing up the year as a whole and speaking in the last few minutes we were just saying that we had an excellent first half against Kilkenny, obviously disappointed with the second half and we were happy enough with the performance down in Wexford, not an easy place to go down and get a result down there. Convincingly, we kind of got our revenge back on Kildare the last day and it was just a really disappointing way to finish it because we would have hoped to have come here today and been competitive but that wasn't to be," Carter ended.