AFTER EIGHT MINUTES of yesterday’s Munster Club SFC final, Austin Stacks trailed The Nire by 1-3 to no score.
While they did manage to get off the mark with a Shane O’Callaghan goal, their Waterford opponents led by four points when Stacks’ Shane Carroll was sent off for a second bookable offence. Despite being a man down, Stacks would only concede a goal for the remainder of the game, running out 3-5 to 2-4 winners.
The manager of the Kerry and now Munster champions Stephen Stack believed that the character of his side shone through as they put the bad start behind them.
“They were magnificent today,” he said.
“I’ve been proud of them this year on other occasions but to do what they did today against an exceptionally good Nire side, when they were on the ropes in the first half, just shows what character and courage they have.
“Our decision-making was a little bit off at the start, we just needed to get our hands on the ball and start doing sensible things with it, not taking pot-shots from anywhere or giving away stupid passes.
“I said to them at half-time that the more width we got into our game the better we would play because then we’d move them around the pitch. They were getting players back and we needed to move them side to side. I told them to trust their footballing instincts and half-time and be sensible with it.”
One area where Stacks were able to get joy was in putting pressure on The Nire’s short kickouts, with the second goal, from David Mannix, the result of that. Stack revealed it was something they had focused on.
“We’d looked at their last game and targeted that,” he said.
“In their last game, eight of their kickouts that they won were short so we targeted that, we felt we’d catch them once or twice because they weren’t used to kicking the ball long, so I wasn’t surprised we got some opportunities from those.”
For his part, Nire manager Benji Whelan admitted they hadn’t taken advantage of the 15-v-14 situation.
“No we didn’t,” he said, “to be fair we didn’t have a plan for that and again that’s a learning experience we’ll take on board as management. It was a hindrance because we didn’t put it to any use, he was standing back in defence though at times he was going forward.
“We’ll sit down, reassess, look at the game and we’ll get the lads together one more time next week – the year’s not over for them, we’ll have a bit of homework to do and we’ll address some of the things that happened so we can kick on from this.”
