Brilliant William Buckley delighted to contribute on sparkling Cork debut

As Munster championship debuts go, William Buckley could hardly have wished for much better.

Six points – five from play and a free at the death – were central to Cork’s four-point win as he won Man of the Match and the 22-year-old St Finbarr’s man, who partnered Alan Connolly and Brian Hayes in the Cork attack, admitted that he hadn’t expected such a return.

“Probably not, no, to be honest,” he said.

“You just wanted to contribute your own bit. I was happy enough – it was great to get going and feeding off the lads there, in fairness to them, Alan, Brian, and all of them.

They were keen to give it to me, as well, so it was great.”

“I suppose, yeah, they [the scores] might have been important but I think it's just, as I said, just feeding off the breaks of the lads.

“And you saw the scores the other lads got there, even Barry [Walsh] today. You can see there, every single one of the lads, [Shane] Barrett even, they all popped up with vital scores today.”

Buckley has shone at every level for club and county and so, while he knew he had a big

opportunity, it was not one to bring on too many nerves or sleepless nights.

“That kind of preparation is done at training,” he said.

“We trained very hard for the last two weeks, even since the start of the year. So that is probably the hardest part, the training.

“When you get selected then, it is just about expressing yourself out there, so that is what it's all about then.”

STAYING GROUNDED

It leaves Cork in a good position ahead of the visit of Limerick next Sunday, with Buckley aware of the importance of dealing with the task at hand.

“Yeah, it was all about two points,” he said, “I think we just focus on the next game.

“It was all about winning here today. I think that's exactly what we did. We knew Tipperary, in fairness, they're All-Ireland champions for a reason, and we came here just to get two points.

“It is great to have a championship game under our belt. Limerick, obviously, are fantastic. We saw that in the league final. We have a lot of work to do again for next week. We'll dust ourselves down and go again for next week.”

For his part, Tipp manager Liam Cahill was naturally disappointed with how his team opened their defence of the All-Ireland.

“Yeah, it was a kind of a game that maybe didn't explode the way maybe people thought,” he said.

“We found it really difficult to put, I suppose, a passage, decent passages of play together consistently throughout the game. So, our execution was poor at times.

“Cork probably had a 10-15 minute period in the second half. There from maybe the eighth or tenth minute on, we kind of lost a foothold on the game and Cork that's where they really, got traction and went seven, eight ahead maybe.

“Huge credit to our lads again, you know, they showed great bottle. Our bench was maybe a little bit behind giving us the traction that we felt we might get, but when they got into their flow there, after getting up to the pace of it, we got a goodish enough contribution, but albeit too late, the clock ran against us.”