Kearney satisfied with pre-season progress
We’re more than happy with how things have been going. The players have put in a tremendous amount of work and we had four games in the last week, which has been sore on everybody but thankfully we came through them with no injuries, which is all you can ask for at this stage.
Results are the last thing we’re analysing at this point of the season. Pre-season is a little bit false in that we’re fielding players in positions they wouldn’t normally play, just to get minutes under their belts. We’re trying to spread the load around and ensure everybody gets a fair amount of game time.
At this point in time we’ve got a squad of 20, including Ciaran who’ll hopefully be back in action around September, and Shane who is looking more at November/December time for his comeback. The only other player who hasn’t featured is Lee Colligan, who we knew would be going to America this summer when we signed him. He’s due to fly back today and should be at training tomorrow night.
When you start pre-season, it’s all about getting the legs going again and building up fitness, but with the later friendlies, you start to look at what team you’re going to be starting on the opening day of the season and trying to make sure those players are firing on all cylinders.
On Saturday, we hit a wall after about 70 minutes and that showed me that the players had put in a serious amount of effort over the previous week. If we’d finished strongly, I’d have had questions over whether they had put in enough effort
