Roscommon hurling boss Johnny Keane may be focusing on retaining division 2B league status but he admits it’s a case of real unknown.
Roscommon get their campaign underway this Sunday when they travel to Letterkenny to face Donegal having not played one pre-season game.
“We’re certainly going into the unknown” explained Keane. “It’s very hard to gauge with training. Training has been going very well and there’s been plenty of appetite and bite in training.”
“Until we get going on Sunday we won’t know exactly where we are, but that will be the same for Donegal and Mayo and Derry and Kildare I would imagine” added Keane.
Keane has refreshed his panel, but without actual game time he admits it will take time for the new members of the panel to bed in.
“Hopefully what we have tried to work on in training will come through, but it won’t all happen at once, so it’s a work in progress” explained Keane.
“We have a bunch of young players coming in and some of them will need a bedding in time and a couple of them will be making their senior debut on Sunday”.
“We’ve agreed with the minor team we’re going to try and blood as many young players as we can in the league and still try and remain competitive”.
While the news that minor and U20 teams can start training from Monday and with competition to begin on June seventh was met with across the country, Keane was a man with a muted happiness.
“We have a couple of Roscommon u20 footballers on our squad, two are starting Sean Trundle and Geoff Lohan who are very good hurlers and who are huge prospects in Roscommon too”.
“That causes a small problem as we didn’t expect the U20 or minors to come back soon or at least be back training. So that will take a bit of management or least at bit of balance in how we work it”.
