All in all, not a great weekend for Kilkenny GAA.
The senior hurlers defeat at the hands of Clare in the Allianz League semi-final, while disappointing, will not see too many Noreside losing any sleep.
Unusually it is a football result that has sent shockwaves through the county and Monday morning the county chairman Ned Quinn went on KCLR FM to apologise to the minor footballers following their 17-20 to 0-0 defeat to Wexford in the Leinster Championship on Saturday.
COMMENT: Wexford's hammering of the Kilkenny minor football team was not sport https://t.co/ktcBpPd6vU pic.twitter.com/uLf9CVqPTW
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) April 17, 2016
“As chairman of the county board, I have overall responsibility for all of our county teams so I accept my responsibilities as regards our minor football team as I do with any other team,” Quinn told John Masterson.
“The second thing I would like to say, with the aid of hindsight, is to express very much regret that the young players who represented our county and were more than willing to represent their county last Saturday suffered the defeat that they did and I will apologise to them for what happened to them during the game on Saturday.”
Quinn confirmed the county board would be meeting to discuss the 71-point hammering on Tuesday night, where Kilkenny’s failure to nurture the big ball code will surely be explored.
“No responsibility lies with the young people. The problems go much deeper. We could spend the whole programme talking about the problems of Gaelic football in Kilkenny,” said Quinn, who said he was “opposed to discontinuing football”.
“In the lead up to the game, by our own standards preparations had gone well, nobody envisaged what was about to happen but it did happen on the day and I would apologise to everybody for that.
“I will say in the GAA in Kilkenny that over the years we’ve got a lot of things right. We have never been able to get football to where we’d like to get it to and we will have to deal with this issues [as a matter of] starting tomorrow night when we will have an executive meeting of the management committee of the county board.”
You can listen to the whole interview below.
