The Treaty county were comfortably outplayed by Derek Lyng’s men, with the Cats recording a 3-17 to 1-15 win to march on to the League final.
“Our performance today was embarrassing at times,” said the Limerick manager
“This is not us exiting the league on our terms. This is us being kicked out of the league on Kilkenny’s terms. That’s the facts of the matter,” he acknowledged.
At the end of the post-match press conference he declined to say it was the team’s worst performance since he took charge in 2016.
“I’ll have to analyse it in more detail, it is hard to tell straight off the cuff. But it is up there with the top two or three anyway, at the wrong end of the stick.”
It was Kiely’s 50th game in charge of Limerick.
Earlier he said: “I don’t think we have played as bad as that (before) to be honest with you. It’s probably 2017 being honest about it. That’s from an internal perspective.
“We have to give cognisance that Kilkenny came with intent and plan, executed very well, their ball-handling skills were good. They were good in the air. They took their chances when they came whereas we were the polar opposite.
“We were poor on the ball, we were poor in defence, we were poor at the things we’re usually pride ourselves in terms of our intensity and our work rate, use of the ball, efficiency, all of the things we would pride ourselves on we were poor. That’s just our perspective on our own performance. As I said it has to be tempered with Kilkenny playing far, far better than we did today.”
“I can assure you we’re not happy to be out of the league. It’s not part of any grand plan I can assure you. We were looking to come here to win our game today and everyone that knows us as a group knows that every single day, we go out we go out to win our matches.”
The post-mortem began as soon as the players returned to the dressing room, according to the manager.
“We’ve sat and chatted there for the last 15 minutes. There’s no excuse. There’s just no excuse. Had we trained today I would have expected to get three times more out of them.
“It’s just not good enough. It’s not acceptable. We know that, they know that. They put their hand up to acknowledge that. It’s just disappointing from our perspective. We have four weeks now to go and put our shoulder to the wheel and by Jesus we have a lot of improving to do.”
He dismissed the notion that the players were fatigued.
“If they were fatigued they’d be fatigued in training. They don’t just get fatigued for matches. We’ve only played, what, eight, nine matches already this year, that’s over three months, they couldn’t possibly be fatigued.
“If they were fatigued you’d see it in training and I’ve seen the opposite in training. But for whatever reason today, I don’t know, it just wasn’t there.
“Now, I’d have to say, how many times in seven or eight seasons has it not been there? Very rarely. So, do they get a pass on this one? It’s not the way we operate. We don’t give each other passes.
“You can’t give yourself a pass at this level of sport. If you give yourself a pass you’re expecting to get another one the next day. We know there won’t be another pass the next day, it’s as simple as that,” said Kiely.
