LIAM CAHILL immediately turned his thoughts to the Championship after steering Waterford to League glory.
A 4-20 to 1-23 victory over Cork delivered just Waterford’s fourth ever title and his first piece of silverware in his third season at helm has them in fine fettle heading into the Munster Championship tie against Tipperary on April 17 with the likes of Austin Gleeson and Jamie Barron still to return.
Cahill said: “When you’re in a final it’s good to perform. The game was a bit cagey early on by both sides, it wasn’t a great spectacle, a lot of mistakes in it but delighted to win it. It’s a good little confidence boost for everybody, myself included.
“The real test will be starting Easter Sunday, let’s call a spade a spade. That’s the real judge.
“Championship hurling is where you really find out whether the jigsaw is coming together or not so we have to really try and get ourselves in the best shape possible and get us back on the pitch and get injuries sorted out and there’ll be a lot of learnings from tonight as well, there was a lot of ball-handling errors and mistakes and a lot of ball that didn’t go to hand that could have created more little openings.”
Cahill admitted that the result “can’t not give us a boost” ahead of the joust with his native county at Walsh Park.
“It’s good. Any time you can get your hands on a bit of silverware and getting your head in front and be able to win them final, we were in two already since we arrived and it is important to get the bit of silverware and start building a bit of confidence as the Championship comes down the tracks.”
Cork manager Kieran Kingston was left to reflect on a dismally disappointing conclusion to a competition that they have failed to win since 1998, with this their fifth final defeat in the interim.
He said: “Up to tonight really I would have said that the League is positive for us. I thought we learned a lot from it.
“In a way, maybe we might learn more from tonight than we would from the games up to now but overall we’ll take a lot from the League. Tonight was hugely disappointing, no question about that, in many aspects of it.
“In a way, the pre-Leaving Cert is over now. Tomorrow we’ll have to review this, recover, press the reset button and get ready for the start of the Leaving Cert in two weeks’ time.”
Kingston rued his side’s wastefulness at one end and defensive frailty at the other.
He added: “Overall you can’t concede four goals in a national final and expect to win, firstly, and secondly you can’t have a conversion rate like we had tonight, where I think it was less than 50%, 17 or 18 missed scoreable chances. Theirs were five or something around that.
“You can’t have those stats and expect to win a national final and that’s disappointing because they’re stats that we didn’t have against us, or for us either for that matter, in the campaign to date but we’ll have to take learnings from those.”
