Ballyea have ‘big characters’ but backs are to the wall following opening round loss

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*James Murphy carries the ball out of defence. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill

BALLYEA are determined to bounce back following an eight point opening round loss to Clonlara.

By Gerry Quinn

For the second year running, Ballyea slumped to first round defeat in the Clare SHC. Saturday’s eight point loss was not as bad as poor as their twelve point loss to Kilmaley last July but they will be concerned with their display when going down to the champions.

Former Galway dual player, Barry Cullinane could only watch on for his first championship outing as Ballyea boss as his side found themselves completely outclassed by the county champions.

They were down eight points at half time and although they fell eleven behind on the restart, the final gap was eight points. “My initial thoughts are that Clonlara were the better team – we probably contributed a lot to that. We had a lot of silly enough turnovers. The goal was a prime example of that. But I thought the second half performance was an awful lot better than the first. We were slow to start but we showed a bit more energy in the second half and battled away, which is testament to themselves. Our backs are against the wall now. I saw a bit of the first game and Éire Óg and Clooney/Quin were impressive but we’ll give it a good shot and see how we come out against them,” Cullinane said.

He remarked that it was “stating the obvious” that they would end up in a relegation battle if they lost out to Clooney/Quin in round two. “We were training on the night the groups were picked and announced and we knew that we got in an all-merciful tight and tough group and that each game was going to be won on its own merit but we were going to be up against it and that’s just the nature of it and Clare hurling is competitive obviously. Clooney/Quin have some outstanding hurlers. But we have big leaders in this dressing room as well and hopefully over the next two weeks we will stand up and put in a big performance”.

With eleven minutes played, Ballyea trailed by just a point but Clonlara hit them hard with six points in succession. “I’ll look at it later on but I’d say out of the six, probably five were either frees or turnovers and even in the second half we gave away their first three scores or three out of their first scores of the second half were soft enough frees that we gave away. It was completely our own fault. So when you do that you are always going to be up against it. We’ll look at the video and we will try and learn as much as we can. We have big characters there that won’t need me to say much. They will do most of the talking themselves”.