Derek Lyng: 'This performance has been coming'

By John Harrington

Not surprisingly, Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng was a very happy man after today’s Leinster SHC final.

His team put Dublin to the sword in style, and after the game he revealed he felt it was a performance that was coming.

“We got a good start and worked our way into the game pretty quickly, I suppose took over most of the pitch and won a lot of the battles, took our scores then when we had the opportunities. We were ready for it today, I suppose.

“The reality of it is I think we have probably been disappointed with some aspects of our performance in the last few weeks. We definitely improved in Parnell and the game against Wexford brought us on again, but we’ve been training really well during that time, we probably have been a little bit frustrated with ourselves in terms of what we brought to some of the games so I think today was a performance that has been coming.

“The attitude has been top class all the time, We've had a lot of challenges, we’ve had injuries and at the same time we’ve given a lot of players game time as well. There is great competition there.

“I think you can perform all you want in training, but it's bringing it into a match situation, that’s what I am most pleased about. Like, we’ve seen that in the last couple of weeks. I’d a feeling today in the warm-up they were on it. It is a credit to the players really.

“But at the same time, in four weeks it will be a different story and we need to keep improving.

“We'll take a few days off and enjoy this and we'll have a look at it and plan it out from there.

“We've a lot of hard work to do. We'll enjoy that, we'll enjoy training, we'll enjoy coming together as a group and we need to challenge each other more and there's competition there now so really looking forward to it now.”