Johnny Crowley proud of Sarsfields players amid injury woes

While managing a busy injury-list has been more of a factor in Sarsfields’ title defence than manager Johnny Crowley would like, he is proud of how his squad have fared to date.

Sunday’s win over Douglas at Páirc Uí Rinn secured second place in Group 2 of the Co-op SuperStores Premier SHC for the champions, behind a Charleville side that had secured top spot after two matches.

Beyond an early spell where Douglas built a lead, Sars looked good as they ran out 3-22 to 1-19 victors – made all the more impressive in Crowley’s eyes as they have battled with key players being injured.

“We're obviously glad to get through to the quarter-final,” he said.

“I suppose we kind of section it off as different competitions – competition A is trying to get out of your group and, look, we've achieved that.

“We have probably two weeks to prepare for whoever we're going to be playing in the quarter-final and I have to give massive credit to the lads, to be fair.

“We've been savaged with injuries. You're looking at it there – we’ve had Conor O’Sullivan out, Bryan Murphy out, Colm McCarthy out, Daniel Hogan out, Luke Hackett out, Killian Murphy out, Jack Leahy out.

“It's hard to try to replace them in such a short space and try to get the fluency within the team and stuff like that.

“I have to give the players massive credit for getting out of the group. Hopefully we might get a small bit of a window over the next 14 days and we'll try and get another few lads back – our medics are on overtime at the moment!

“We’ll try and get them back and see where we go with that.”

Despite the absentees, Sars still possess depth the and competition for places that comes with that. Luke Hackett scoring their third goal just after coming on as a sub underlined that.

“Luke is a great guy to come off the bench,” said Crowley.

“He's so focused and driven, to be fair to the lad. Nothing seems to faze him, so I'm delighted for Luke.

“It was good to see Colm McCarthy come on for the last five or ten minutes as well, just getting a small bit of game time into him again.

“Ideally, you'd love to have everybody available because, obviously, with everybody available it drive the standards.

“Sometimes when you get these injuries mid-season, within the season, it's very difficult because you plan for a system, you plan for a way and all of a sudden you've got two or three lads out.

“It's okay when you've got one going but, when you've got two or three lads going at the same time, you're almost patching up then at that stage.

“But again, massive credit to the lads. They had a job to do, that was our first target of the year, to get out of our group.

“We’ve done that, so we’ll assess things now again, we’ll talk to our medics and to see who we have and who we don't have and we’ll prepare then for who we’re going to meet.”

The next challenge is a Kanturk side riding high after eliminating Blackrock – will Crowley have more of a hand to choose from?

“You'd be hopeful of maybe two coming back,” he said.

“I think the other three or four are more long-term. We’d hope, out of the six, that you’d have a couple available.”