Delighted Bergin still has eye on the bigger prize for Kilkenny

The third time proved to be the charm for Niall Bergin after he led the Kilkenny minors to Leinster success on Saturday.

The Cats boss is in his third year in charge of the team and despite losing two round-robin ties, the team has found a winning flow in recent weeks.

“I’m thrilled now, just delighted for the lads as they are such an honest group,” he said. “They’ve put in a huge amount of work over the last six months and they’ve been up and they’ve been down.

“There’s an old saying that you learn more in defeat. We definitely did that and we also built a lot of character at the same time.

“They’ve been brilliant from one to 32 all year and delighted to get the rewards with some silverware as well.”

Bergin outlined the difficulty in trying to overcome a Dublin team that defeated them already.

“Dublin are a very difficult team to play against. First and foremost, they are good hurlers. Secondly, they set up a sweeper and play quite defensively.

“We studied them and they are hard to break down and they don’t concede too many scores, but on the flip side for them, they don’t score too much themselves.

“Our backs were to the wall at half-time all the same, we only led by two after playing with a strong wind. We felt we maybe needed more but the lads were top class in the third quarter and we really got a stranglehold around the middle of the field.”

Victory was built on a strong second half performance.

“We know we have that potential to do it and we did it against Galway and that was referenced with the lads at half-time and we did the same in the third quarter as we did in the semi-final.

“We’d like to do that for the whole game but it’s just about getting the win and we can now look forward to an All-Ireland semi-final in a few weeks time.

“This was our sixth game in six weeks and we need a break now, the fear was we’d have another game again next weekend.

“On a personal note, it’s nice, of course it is. The bottom line here is developing players though and winning trophies is good and all that but development is huge and things are going in the right direction in Kilkenny which is great,” the O’Loughlin Gaels man added.