Hanley has a pop at the media after loss to Antrim
Westmeath senior hurling manager Brian Hanley was far-from-downcast despite his wasteful troops losing their Leinster championship round robin opener by six points to Antrim (0-23 to 2-11) in Ballycastle last Sunday.
“If you don’t take your chances, you won’t win games. Cork almost got beaten up here. It is awful place to go, but our shooting let us down even though we got the two goals at the right time,” he said.
The Athenry man acknowledged that his team had started very impressively, scoring four unanswered points with just a little over five minutes played, before going on to express his displeasure with recent media coverage.
“Yeah, it was a great start to go four points up and they were flat. The media had written that we were only a club team. It’s degrading to those players. We have over a hundred sessions done. People who don’t know what’s going on, reporting what’s going on. We were set up perfectly to perform well. I knew the truth. The players knew the truth.
'You can see how galvanised we are, how organised we are. I rang Martin Fogarty (a former selector with Kilkenny) four weeks ago. We are friends for a long time. I asked him, ‘do you want to give me a hand?’ A person won’t say, ‘sound Brian, I’ll come up’, if things are not being done right. It has helped. Alan Mangan has also done great work (as a selector). It’s unfortunate about Seamus Ennis’ work commitments. I’m still on the phone to Seamus every day. He’s a great man and he brought a lot to that team out there today. He would be very proud of what we did today,” he continued.
London’s unexpected draw with Carlow, also last Sunday, has thrown the mini-group wide open. Indeed, the result allowed Hanley to have another pop at the press.
“When we drew there (in Ruislip against London), people reported on the game that it was bad result. It was a good result for us in the league, but it set us back and we never really recovered. London are a good side. We had players back today - Eoin Price, Tommy Gallagher, Aonghus Clarke and Alan Devine. We were missing half a team. We would have been in a league final. All the rubbish that was reported. There are two sides to every story. I have the truth, but I kept it to myself.”
When asked to comment on Westmeath’s two red cards, the bainisteoir was initially non-committal, but he opened up when further queried by local press personnel.
“A second yellow is normally warranted (referring to Aaron Craig). I saw Tommy (Gallagher) clearly. He got a man on the shoulder and it moved up along and hit him on the helmet underneath. Yer man was grand, but the linesman got too big for his boots in my opinion. But we have cameras.
'It’s unfortunate for the referees and the linesmen that it’s these games that they have to first implement new directives. This won’t happen with a Clare-Tipperary game, or a Waterford-Cork game. It’ll happen with a Westmeath-Antrim game up here. All the talk of the sendings off will deflect from all the work we have done, which is on a par with any other county.”
Looking ahead to the Laois game next Sunday (Cusack Park, 3pm), Hanley was upbeat.
'They are further up the ladder than us, but we can only concentrate on ourselves. Tommy Gallagher will be a loss. Philip Gilsenan is injured and so is Paddy Layde. We have a few more to come in hopefully this week,' he said.
We’ll have our homework done on Laois. You can see we had our homework done for today and we have in every game, but you’re relying on us putting the ball over the bar and we didn’t do that today,” added Hanley.