By John Harrington

Chris Crummey knows Dublin are underdogs against Kilkenny in tomorrow’s Leinster SHC clash at Parnell Park, but he’s optimistic they can produce an upset.

“We’re full confidence that if we put in a strong performance that we can beat any team,” Crummey told GAA.ie.

“We don't really listen to much talk outside the camp, what people are saying or what the bookies odds are or anything.

“But we have a lot of confidence in ourselves and we think that if we get our performance right for 70 minutes and get that level of consistency, then we're a match for anyone.”

Kilkenny won the Allianz Hurling League impressively this year, but the prospect of playing the Cats isn’t something to strike fear into the hearts of Crummey’s generation of Dublin hurlers.

Many of them have beaten Kilkenny at underage level, and Crummey sees no reason why they can’t do the same in the senior grade.

“We're fairly familiar with playing Kilkenny down through the years at minor, U-21 and senior and even a lot of their newer lads would be playing a lot of college hurling with a lot of our younger lads as well,” he said.

“To be honest, we'd be very familiar with each other and there's definitely a confidence there even if we know how difficult a challenge it's going to be.

“You want to be playing the best teams and the best players in the country and they're the bench-mark at the moment, but we feel that if we can produce a performance we can beat any team on our day, and that's what we'll be trying to do.

“Obviously playing in Parnell Park the first game, hopefully we get at massive Dublin crowd and we'll be able to feed off the atmosphere. We're just really looking forward to it.”

Crummey says Dublin will also source self-belief from Cuala’s achievement of winning All-Ireland Club titles back to back, particularly as some of Cuala’s most difficult matches during those two campaigns came within the Dublin Championship itself.

“The Dublin Championship is just so competitive at the moment,” said Crummey. “There's definitely five, six or seven teams of challenging for it.

“Everyone has seen has successful Cuala have been for the last few years and I really think that has brought a lot of confidence to Dublin clubs because they feel that if they can get over Cuala and win a Dublin championship that there's the potential for more there.

“There's a lot of brilliant players within the county and it's just a matter of bringing that to the county scene now and performing at that level.

“We've seen what Cuala have done and how successful they have been. So we know that Dublin hurlers and the standard of hurling in Dublin is definitely right up there. We have to transfer that to the county scene and that's what we're really trying to do this year and we have great confidence in ourselves that we will.”