Limerick hurler Declan Hannon.
By Cian O'Connell
Declan Hannon acknowledges something had to change: Limerick just wanted to deliver in the Allianz Hurling League.
Earning promotion from Division 1B was the target so the manner of their last group game win over Galway offered a significant injection of hope. Subsequent performances against Clare and Tipperary in the knockout stages added to Limerick's belief.
John Kiely, though, had Limerick primed to produce in the spring. "I suppose we kind of decided this year that we had to be different," Hannon admits. "If we kept doing what we were doing the past number of years we’d just get the same results, which were being knocked out in the qualifiers.
"Then it’s a case of going into work and you’re in bad, bad form, you just don’t want to be there. This year we just sat down and said, ‘Can we just be different this year?’ and so far we got out of 1B, we’d been trying for a number of years trying to get out of there. Not through a lack of trying or anything like that, it just didn’t happen for us. We just fell short each year.
"It was kind of demoralising that you couldn’t get out of that 1B and, ‘Another year now, back into that’ and that was kind of your mentality going into the Championship, that you hadn’t done what you hoped to do before starting the Championship so I suppose this year is different.
"There should be a lot of confidence in going into the Championship. It would have been nice getting to a League final, it would have been nice to beat Tipperary in the League semi-final, but that was a good game and I’d imagine May 20th will be quite similar. It’s exciting."
Declan Hannon and Billy McCarthy during the Allianz Hurling League Semi-Final at Semple Stadium.
Hannon accepts that the daring way Limerick finished against All Ireland champions Galway at Pearse Stadium is hugely important ahead of the summer.
"I suppose from a mental point of view it was huge for us," Hannon says. "Like, as I said, in the past few years we didn’t get out of 1B and it was draining I suppose as well.
"You just felt you weren’t after getting to where you wanted to be, but this year we have. We went in at half-time and there was no real panic or anything like that even though we were down by the bones of 10 points, eight points, but there wasn’t any panic.
"We hadn’t done what we were supposed to do in the first half. We hadn’t played the way we said we would and it was only small little changes in how we were playing that we went out in the second half and performed the way we did and it made a big difference.
“We kind of just grinded our way back into the game and thankfully got the win and to get the win in Galway against the All-Ireland champions was big for us, big in our development because we’re quite a young squad at the minute and it would just give us a boost in terms of having confidence in your own ability and that, look, we are good enough to compete anyway."
The next test is Tipperary at the Gaelic Grounds in the Munster Championship on Sunday.
