Opinion- Complacent Cats took their eye off the ball

Kilkenny will be disappointed with their performance overall. I think this is one of the games where maybe the attitude that they brought to it was their downfall.

People can look at tactics and different things but Kilkenny will be disappointed at how they approached the game. I’ve often been part of teams at both club and county level where sometimes you were a little bit complacent coming into it and the other team punished you because of it.

Carlow rightly upped their game and played to the best of their ability and it was a big draw for them.

Kilkenny, on the other hand, will look at the 17 wides and having a player sent off and they’ll also look at the overall performance of the team and the panel and whether they were complacent or not.

That’s a very difficult thing to rectify on the field when you arrive to the game in that way as it’s not something you can correct during the game.

It’s more to do with the mindset beforehand and they’ll definitely look to rectify it against Dublin and Wexford.

When they were eight points up a couple of minutes into the second half, you were saying that they’d just see out this game but we saw in the Wexford and Antrim game that this ain’t always the way things go.

Carlow can take a lot from this game and even if they had lost, they could still take positives from it and they were always going to play for the 70 minutes and see what they could get from it.

Really it looked like Kilkenny took their foot off the gas a bit and that word again complacency comes into it - when they were in a strong position they should have been really looking to see out the game in a strong manner as opposed to just doing enough to see it out.

That’s something they will be disappointed with and when Carlow got their purple patch, it was the wides that hurt Kilkenny again.

Carrying the ball to the scorers kind of disappeared from Kilkenny’s game and a small bit of panic set in so there was a few things that culminated in the last 10 or 15 minutes that gave Carlow their chance.

A lot of players have been given their chance and each team factors in a few injuries but Kilkenny are getting a lot of them and it’s a tough position for them to be in.

It’s the reality for a lot of teams though and it’s down to the schedule really which has followed on from a condensed league campaign.

It’s something that teams just have to deal with and move forward and players should be looking at this as an opportunity to nail down a starting jersey or even get yourself into a matchday panel with a few good performances.

From Kilkenny’s point of view they will be looking to get a few of those players back on the field as soon as possible.

They know that they won’t get them all back as quickly as they’d like but even if they got Paddy Deegan, Richie Reid and even a potential Eoin Cody then that would definitely serve to settle the ship.

Experienced lads like them would definitely improve thing but it’s certainly a tough situation for Kilkenny to be in and the panel, as a whole, just have to take it on the chin.

Saturday’s game will be a great test to focus the minds and Kilkenny have usually had Dublin’s number over many years now so there’s a chance that the complacency against Carlow could creep in again.

I don’t believe that will happen as they’ll look at this as a game where they could really lay down a marker.

Dublin will be coming into this thinking they’ve a real chance of qualifying now and if there was another upset on the cards, it would put them in a really strong position.

I’m expecting a reaction from Kilkenny here. Any year that we’ve lost a game or been disappointed with a performance, the first thing you wanted was to play another match as soon as possible so this is a good opportunity for the lads.

Dublin will be a stern test as they have the likes of Donal Burke back who is an outstanding hurler and as a whole they can turn on a bit of flair and aggression and they are a very fit team.

Kilkenny will have their work cut out but it’s still a great opportunity for the team as it will give them a chance to reset from the Carlow game and put in a good performance and try get those two points on the board which would be a huge step in getting back to a Leinster final and that’ll be back to where they wanted to be in the first place.

This has probably been the most exciting Leinster championship since 2019 anyway and a lot of the predictions have fallen through which has left a bit of egg on the face for pundits but it’s great for supporters and it’s what we needed and the reality is that there’s very little between a number of teams.