D Day Looms

Our last training weekend of the season and it started with many question marks remaining over the Championship and Shield panels. On Friday night we were out in the BSB focussing mostly on kicking, shooting and some conditioned games. On Saturday we moved to a grass pitch in Brussels centre and played a full pitch match.

Going into the weekend, I had a fair idea of how I thought the panels would shape up but myself and Conan had yet to sit down and go through them. However, after the back to back sessions, a few more lads clawed their way back into contention and that makes the decisions a little less straight forward.

Since the beginning of the year when Conan and Eoin split the panels in Lux, the door has remained open for guys to stake a claim for a place on the Championship team. The result is that we now have a much larger array of options in each position and have been able to cope with the loss of a hoard of players.

Within today or tomorrow, we will finalise everything and the lads will be waiting eagerly for the news. There is a healthy tension there at the moment and it was needed heading into the weekend. Tom Lane, back from his global travels, was down at the match yesterday and he commented how there was a noticeable edge to the game.

We played four twelve minute quarters and by the final quarter many of the issues had been ironed out. Our foul count has dropped massively in the last week and that would be one of the main improvements we are looking for in Limerick. Our defensive set-up is solid so we will be hard to score against but we must make sure we don’t cough up innocuous frees and give teams an easy way into the game.

The tension I mentioned was visible right through the group over the last week both on and off the pitch. It brought the best out of the majority of fellas and we have a much more tuned group than we would have had a couple of weeks ago or even before either of the last two tournaments.

The immediate priority now is to get the panels named and not have that tension burn up energy unnecessarily. Many of the team have already left for Ireland and others will go in the coming days so we will have one final run out on Tuesday evening and leave it at that.

The roadwork is done and I'm confident that when the lights go on next Saturday, we'll have two teams primed for action.