\u201cno great shakes\u201d<\/a> and has since admitted he tried to \u201cwrite them down\u201d ahead of the game in Parnell Park on Sunday.<\/p>\nThe O\u2019Loughlin Gaels man felt the championship had been lost for Kilkenny before the defeat in Donnycarney. \u201cThey were never firing even though we’d be trying to fire them up and get them going.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut Derek (Lyng) was probably doing the same thing but it just wasn’t there in them. How much dirty ball did we win, how many rucks did we win?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cFifteen minutes to go, the white towel could have been thrown in, it was all over. They were not at the races at all, in umpteen positions. I don’t think anybody came out and won their position, really.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Having spoken with several hurling people since the loss, Comerford feels the common theme is the development squads are counter-productive.<\/p>\n
\u201cDevelopment squads, they’ve gone by their sell-by-date now. I’m after ringing 15 or 16 lads there to know what their opinion is on development squads. It’s just not working.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet these lads go back to their clubs at 14 years of age. Put in a team, enter a team in Tony Forristal (tournament). By all means, enter a team but release them to a manager five days prior to that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Comerford argued development squads are leading to bad habits among players and parents are pressurising managers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cLads are getting browned off. Players are getting sick of it. Mentors are getting sick of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve heard they’re receiving 29, 30 phone-calls from parents. \u2018Why isn’t my young lad on a development squad?\u2019 \u2018Why isn’t he on this?\u2019 \u2018Why isn’t he on that?\u2019 It has to stop. End of story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Comerford added: \u201cPlayers are getting ragged off of hurling. They’re going in there and they’re dragging their feet in. You have to be spontaneous. Spontaneity in hurling you need. You need to look forward to going to training. Not dragging your legs into going to training.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlayers are coming back with egos, back into their clubs and they’re untrainable. I\u2019ve often heard players are coming back after being with county teams and they’re not producing the goods for their clubs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Comerford said Dublin have to be looked at as an example. \u201cIt was done in Dublin. They had to go through the phonebook to identify people who had played inter-county. That’s what we should be taking from Dublin. Not bringing down one of their coaches to coach our senior team (Niall Corcoran).<\/p>\n
\u201cWe shouldn’t be doing that. We should identify this and put a line in the sand as of tonight. The county board has to step in and say, \u2018Listen, we’re going to help you out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andy Comerford believes development squads are \u201cgone by their sell-by date\u201d and they should be disbanded as part…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[177329,1965,85426,42,14611,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-466748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-championship-2026","tag-hurling","tag-leinster-gaa","tag-headlines","tag-kilkenny-gaa","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}