Austin Stacks suffered a heavy defeat to Nemo Rangers in the Munster club football semi-final at Páirc Uí Rinn on Sunday, going down by 18 points to the Cork champions.
It was only determined that Stacks would represent the Kingdom in Munster when East Kerry beat Dr Crokes in the Kerry SFC final a week earlier. East Kerry are a divisional team, one comprised of several clubs, and so they are not eligible to play at provincial level.
Instead, it was Tralee team Stacks, who won the Kerry club championship back in April, who went forward to play Nemo.
"We're suffering a bit now," Austin Stacks manager Wayne Quillinan told RTÉ Radio One's Sunday Sport after the game.
There's a million things you could put a performance like that down to. You could use that excuse about not having real competitive games in the last couple of weeks but I don't believe in that at all. We just weren't at the races, we didn't show up.
We had a game plan. We had a lot of homework done on Nemo but they were just... game time, you can't beat game time. They seemed sharper on the breaking ball. They looked more game conditioned than us.
Their shot accuracy was fantastic compared to ours. One of the lads said they had 31 attacks as opposed to our 10. That tells its own story.
There was real emotion in Quillinan's voice as he spoke to RTÉ's John Kenny.
"I'm a Stacks man through and through and I love my club, whether I'm the manager or a supporter, it's very hard to take," said Quillinan.
"You put your heart and soul into something, it breaks your heart to see it."
When asked about his future as Stacks manager, Quillinan responded:
"I can't even think straight at the minute. We have a league to finish off. It'll be hard to get the lads focused after today. It's been a long day."
Picture credit: Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile
