Sunday May 1

Leinster Senior Hurling Championship Round Robin

**Kerry v Carlow, Tralee, 1pm. **

By John Harrington

Carlow captain Seamus Murphy admits he has watched the Kerry hurlers a little green-eyed this year.

The Kingdom succeeded where Carlow failed in 2013 by retaining their Division 1B status in the Allianz Hurling League in their first season up in the grade to rubber-stamp their status as the most progressive mid-tier hurling team. Carlow travel to Tralee today to face Kerry in the first match of the Leinster Championship Round Robin, and Murphy has been impressed by the strides their opponents have made so far this season.

“It's fantastic, yeah,” he says. “You'd be jealous looking over at them really. In one sense they've come out of nowhere. People wouldn't have really said Kerry, because you would have talked about other teams, are a team that's coming but they came out of nowhere and they've done great work and fair play to them.

Carlow were competitive in Division 1B themselves three years ago, running teams like Wexford, Limerick, and Offaly very close. Ultimately they were beaten in a relegation play-off by Antrim, and Murphy believes they would be a better team now had they managed to preserve their 1B status like Kerry have.

“I think so, yeah. It was the big prize, getting up there and staying up is massive for Kerry. I suppose people maybe thought when they had to play that relegation game, maybe it was a bridge too far for them but I mean it's brilliant. The more years you can get playing against the teams, that's the big thing with teams trying to progress. The more you play against the better teams, yeah, you might take some beatings but it's all about improving the speed of your hurling and learning from playing these teams. You have to get sustained games against them."

Murphy has ‘no issues’ with a Munster team like Kerry competing in Leinster, and he hopes victory over them today can be a springboard to a long summer for the Barrow-siders

“The expectation would be to come out of the group, have a good crack at whoever we get in the quarter-final and go further if we can,” he says. “If not, go the other route and have a good crack at the qualifiers. That would be the expectation, to progress, to go forward from last year. We would have felt that we didn't do ourselves justice at all last year in the group given that we had to turn over Antrim in the last game to avoid the Christy Ring. We'd be hoping to progress and be challenging at the top of the group rather than be facing into winning our last game to stay up again.”