Paul Murphy says Kilkenny had to put their heavy league semi-final loss to Clare behind them and push on.

After losing to the Banner by nine points in mid-April, the defending provincial and All-Ireland champions went into the summer with question marks hanging over them but duly dispatched Dublin to qualify for this weekend's Leinster SHC final against Galway:

"I suppose Brian [Cody, manager] often says it to us, if you're not tuned in at all on a certain day you're capable of getting absolutely blown off the pitch. Maybe that was the case against Clare. It's not so much that we had the injuries and stuff. We don't like to make excuses about injuries," the Danesfort clubman says in The Irish Examiner.

"We always say, for good or bad, that we feel we have a good enough team to win any match when we go out. That day, maybe the heads weren't tuned. Clare were brilliant that day, they just really hit the ground running, as they've been doing all year and, look, they just blew us off the pitch.

"You're aware obviously of the way people are thinking. It's very hard to avoid it. It's social media and even if you're not reading the papers it's going to pop up somewhere, unknown to yourself. So you are aware obviously but it's natural I suppose for people to kind of question after such a heavy defeat. What way are they? Mentally are they after taking a bad hit there? Are they capable of having a panel good enough to beat Dublin or to push on?

"So, that's natural but you just have to take these things on the chin. That's what sport is about. People are there to analyse how teams are going and it'd actually be ridiculous if someone looked at us and said, 'ah, Kilkenny are perfectly fine'.

"Obviously, after a big defeat like that it's natural for people but we knew where we were, we knew we had lads to come back. Championship is a lot different from league so we just got the heads focused in. We didn't really care what everyone else was doing, just focused on our own game, really."

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