‘We're confident that we will be in a lot better place come the McDonagh’ - Fitzgerald

Barry Fitzgerald 

LAOIS'S first outing under Tommy Fitzgerald finally took place on Sunday with a home clash against Offaly, though unfortunately for the manager and his charges it didn't end in victory.

Offaly's sharpness in the second half saw them pull away and a lack of match practice for Fitzgerald's men had its part to play, though he insisted it's not an excuse to lean on either.

Speaking on the lack of game time after Sunday's clash Fitzgerald said: “You’d imagine it was probably a factor alright, we could have done with the game last week obviously, but I felt we trained well enough this week and it was a disappointing performance so we’ll have to pull our socks up and get ready for next week.

“We’ll review the video and try to get the heads right, but that was poor enough now.” On the game itself Fitzgerald said: "We were under pressure at times in the first 15 or 20 minutes, but we settled in after that stage. We went in two points up at half time after having the small breeze so we were probably happy enough at half time looking at our stats and how we finished the first half.

"There was a five or ten minute period in the second half where the game just got away from us, Offaly turned us over too often and too cheaply, we gave away a lot of frees and we struggled with our own puckouts.

"We'll have to look at that and work on it and try to be better each week."

The Laois manager pointed out in interviews before the start of the league that he felt work was needed and he added to that point in saying: "We've a few lads who were back late and we were late starting as well, I'm not trying to make excuses but preparations probably weren't ideal over the last few weeks and months with games being called off.

"This week probably came a bit too soon for some fellas and we have two or three coming back over the next couple of weeks."

Two teams face the chop from this division and Fitzgerald reckons it's important that Laois keep their spot at this level to continue to improve.

"It is fairly cut throat. At the same time it's a good league in that all the games are competitive, in recent years I thought the league was a bit stale and for us you can see the difference in the quality between 1B and Division 2. It's massive so we're going to have to get a few wins on the board to keep ourselves in this division," he said.

"If we were to go down it's a massive difference in the standard of hurling we'd be playing."

There's still a long year ahead and Fitzgerald is confident that his side can only improve from here.

"We will get better week on week, we're confident of that and we're confident that we will be in a lot better place come the McDonagh.

"We've a couple of months to prepare for that but our immediate priority is to learn from today and we need to learn quickly because we need to pick up a couple of wins along the road."