Shane Stapleton discussed Offaly and their fall from grace on The Hurling Show with former Offaly hurler Michael Verney.
“We started, actually, really well. We were 0-4 to 0-0 up but the mood before the match wasn’t good,” said the latter.
Offaly had been showing worrying signs before the game with “a lot of rumours and bad talk” according to Stapleton. The worries of inexperienced players were a fear for many but Daithí Regan’s comments seemed to cause more issues.
“The timing of it was atrocious, to be honest with you... the sense in the county was that morale was quite low. That definitely didn’t do anyone any favours. You can’t legislate though for not starting Joe Bergin in the biggest game that we’ve had in 20 years. A fully fit Joe Bergin.”
Stapleton and Verney’s understanding of the situation had been that Bergin was involved in an altercation and despite apologising, wasn’t allowed on the team. Verney still couldn’t justify the decision to bench their best player.
“It doesn’t make sense to me, I think he had averaged 9.3 points in the three Joe McDonagh games before that.”
“I’m sure the idea was that when he came on he’d get a reaction but Offaly are after having a man sent off, after missing a penalty. When he came on he was already swimming against the tide and it was going to be very difficult. We were always chasing the game.”
The biggest issues that caused Offaly to lose however appeared to be discipline considering the number of frees that they gave away and their performance when they were down to 14 men.
“You can’t give away 11 scoring chances from frees and expect to win a game. We were thereabouts but you never thought we were going to get a goal to sneak it. It probably wouldn’t have been deserved if we had.”
“With some teams, you’d say, ‘they played 15 against 14 but it didn’t make much of a difference. They didn’t make use of it.’ Exact opposite. Three minutes after the sending off, Kerry were a completely different team. They looked up every time they got the ball, free-man was there, played the ball very cleverly and no long ball whatsoever."
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