Waterford forward Stephen Bennett says while they’re delighted to have won Division 1B of the Allianz National Hurling League, they know better than anybody that they cannot afford to finish the same way come Munster Championship.

While it was largely comfortable for 55 minutes in their 1-27 to 2-20 win against Offaly on Sunday – the opposition outscored the Deise by 1-10 to 0-2 in the last fifteen minutes.

Stephen Bennett scored 0-12 on the day, and the Ballysaggart star admitted that the last few minutes did put somewhat of a dampener on the performance.

“I suppose it’s not the trophy we want to be playing for – but any day we’re playing you’d want to win the cup. You know, if there’s a cup on offer, a lot of lads in the dressing room haven’t won any cups. There’s no harm. The league is so competitive. Clare won the All-Ireland last year, they’ll be playing Division 2 next year – so there’s nothing to be laughed at either. I suppose we’d be very disappointed with how we finished. We played well enough for the first 50 minutes, but we were terrible there for 10 minutes. We really have to work on that. If that’s against Clare now in three weeks’ time, the game will be over. We’ve a lot to work on, but happy enough.”

Speaking after the game – the former All-Star said that with all respect to the teams that they’ve faced, it will be a massive step up for the Munster Championship.

“We won’t be reading too much into it today. It’s hard to know. No disrespect, we’re going to have to jump up. It’s been very competitive, but I suppose we’re going to have to be way better to be playing against Clare and Limerick. We’ve Clare and Limerick in six days. Your year could be over after that, so we’re just looking at Clare now first. I think we’ve avoided the first round, so we’ve three weeks now to get right and hopefully get a few bodies back. We’ve big players missing now still. Austin Gleeson, Conor Prunty, Patrick Fitzgerald, Kevin Mahony and more lads to come back in – we’ve got a few, we need to get them right and hopefully we’ve a full deck of cards to pick from.”

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