Tommy Larkins face ultimate test against county champions Loughrea

Niall Kelly’s charges produced impressive performances in their quarter-final win over Turloughmore and semi-final extra-time success over Clarinbridge to seal their place into the county final for the first time since 1971.

“What we’ve done already is a super achievement, we’ve been treating it as one game at a time. That’s the way we are going to be now, we’ve a huge task ahead of us, to even talk about being county champions is just wonderful for our club and for the whole area,” Tommy Larkins manager Niall Kelly told Tribune Sport.

“We know what we are up against, we are up against a team who were in the All-Ireland club final against a superb Ballygunner team and only just came up short. We’ve huge task ahead of us, if we can go in and play to our strengths and maybe hope that Loughrea might be down a little bit then we can talk about it after Sunday evening, but being in the county final is just massive for us and we look forward to the whole day and seeing what it brings.”

Kelly added current Offaly senior hurling manager Johnny Kelly to his backroom team this season and the Portumna clubman has brought an extra edge to the east Galway club according to the Tommy Larkins manager.

“Johhny Kelly has been great, it didn’t just all happen this year, we’ve been building slowly each year. At the start of this year, we didn’t feel sorry for ourselves after last year’s quarter-final defeat to St Thomas’. We had a look and said what kind of things can we improve.

“We put our wish-list together and Johnny Kelly was at the top of that. We went to him and I was delighted when he came on board. It’s an affirmation of everything we are doing in Tommy Larkins, when an inter-county manager and a man of Johnny Kelly’s experience tells us that we are doing the right thing and to keep going it’s brilliant.

"It brings confidence to the players when all the management team are working together but having Johnny Kelly in your corner in a tight situation is brilliant."

Jason Flynn, Eanna and Ronan Murphy and Cian Daniels have all excelled for Tommy Larkins this season, while Conor Gradiner, Kevin McHugo, Darren Duggan, Adrian Moran, Conor Slattery and Ben Porter have also been topthe fore in the club’s qualification for just a second county final.

“We’ve a very strong panel, this is my third year involved; we’ve tried to add something each year. The lads are very honest with each other, they wouldn’t be shy about criticising each other or calling each other out. They’ve set very high standards.

“There’s lots of other guys that maybe aren’t mentioned as much but do equally as much. Our Junior team have probably driven standards as much as anyone in the group. Two years ago, we only had a Junior B team, they won the Junior B and went on to an All-Ireland final.

“Now we are going to have a Reeves Cup team next year, that’s the strength and depth that we are hoping to build. You look at the bigger teams and that's what they have. We are trying to do the same ourselves and we are getting there.”

Kelly was pleased with his side’s spread of scorers in their semi final win over Clarinbridge.

“People questioned after the Turloughmore game that we left too much to Jason Flynn to do, so the lads took it on the chin and we had a good spread of scorers the last day. It’s important that we do the same thing again the next day, and express the best parts about our hurling game,” concluded the Larkins boss.