DUBLIN MANAGER GER Cunningham is determined to move on from his side’s emphatic Leinster senior hurling quarter-final replay loss to Galway.
After the 5-19 to 1-18 defeat at O’Connor Park, Cunningham is eager not to dwell on the negatives and is looking forward to their next big game.
“There’s only so much time that you can reflect on stuff like that. It’s four weeks until the next round of the qualifiers so we’ll get back in straight away.
“We know some of the Munster teams and the third one’s going to be Limerick or Tipp,” Cunningham said at the launch of Toyota’s Summer Showtime, which runs from June 10-13.
And the manager admits his Dublin side have made life very difficult for themselves.
“It’s as tough as you’re going to get. It’s a direction we hadn’t planned on going. We hoped to get to a Leinster final and try and win that, and go through the front door. But we are where we are and we have to accept that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“You would hope that there will be a reaction from us as a group. Lads need to react themselves on how they performed and what they did and what they didn’t do and look as to why.
“And we’ll look from our point of view to see how to help them achieve their potential.
“It’s a collective thing from Saturday, there is no blame on any one particular group, it’s all of us together.
“We have to regroup and get the spirit back and get the focus back and get our motivation back and take it forward.”
Meanwhile, Dublin defender Mikey Carton says the team face a serious test of character in the wake of the Galway defeat.
“I suppose we’ll see what the team’s made of now. We’ve four weeks to see what Dublin hurling is about so we’ll find out now in four weeks’ time.
“It was a very tough day out… To perform like that was very disappointing, to be honest.
“The first 10 minutes we were blown away with the three goals. You can’t give three goals away like that to a team like Galway and expect to go on and win championship matches. And then we just couldn’t get back into it.
“You don’t see it coming but you try not to let the heads drop and have some pride in the jersey and fight back. But there wasn’t too much fight in us.”
However, in spite of the Galway debacle, Carton insists the Dubs are capable of recovering from this significant setback in the weeks to come.
“Absolutely, definitely,” he said, when asked if they were still genuine contenders in the race for the Liam MacCarthy Cup.
“We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think we could win the All-Ireland. That’s obviously the aim. But we have to get over the next round first.”
