“I don’t want to be compared to anyone else. We are who we are. We are ourselves. We are Limerick. We are ourselves. We are honest in our endeavour. We are honest with each other in our appraisal of our performances.

“And we only look to the next day in any one sense. That is the bottom line. And the rest is absolute nonsense. And I feel very strong on that. End of story.” Kiely accepted that the next challenge is managing the break to the All-Ireland semi-final - something that many Munster champions have failed to do in recent years.

“Of course it has to be asked, we have to ask ourselves if this is a challenge we can take on now.

“Winning a Munster championship where there are five games to be played is a challenge. Winning the All-Ireland last year was a huge challenge. So this is another challenge that is after being laid at our door and it is a brilliant challenge.

“And I have no doubt we will sit down during the week and we will lay out a plan for the following three and a half weeks and we will go hard at it. And the challenge for us is to make sure we are right on the day of the semi-final.” Kiely accepted that Limerick could have been more clinical in the Gaelic Grounds yesterday, adding they “did switch off” for the first Tipperary goal: “We did leave scores after us, there’s no two ways about that.

“Believe me, we left too many - it’s the only possible stain on the performance for me, that we didn’t put it to bed earlier.

“There was a three-four point swing after half-time when we could have six points up, they came up the field and got a goal - a swing of four or five points in about two minutes, and I said to myself, ‘yeah, we’re destined to make this a really tough slog’.

“Obviously we did switch off for two or three seconds (for the first goal). It was an error. We spoke about it at half time.

“We couldn’t make that type of error again. That just goes to show you the quality of forwards they have: that when they get that split second they can really punish you.” Crediting his players with “driving the standards”, Kiely added that yesterday’s home Munster final was an important game for Limerick to win.

“Listen, that is what they expect of themselves. It is not what we expect of them.

“And if they don’t produce that level of performance they are the ones who are going to be disappointed tomorrow morning when they get their sight of the report to see what exactly did happen. They have to drive the standards.

“When you’re playing at home . . . you don’t get too many opportunities, these are things you’d carry with you for a long time afterwards.

“If you were to look back on a fixture like this - a Munster final at home, with the team we have and what we know we can produce in terms of the level of performance . . . if we didn’t produce that today it would have been very disappointing.

“For that reason it probably did put us under a lot of pressure, but the boys react well under pressure.” In that sense he was happy with the result - though he admitted the winning margin wasn’t what he expected.

“Absolutely not, no. It’s hard to know what to expect from Munster finals, they can become a slugfest, and other times they can be like that one.

“I thought the game was full of quality right up to a few minutes before half-time, I felt we were wresting control of the game at that stage but up to then I thought it was really high quality stuff from both sides.

“We began to find our rhythm, our intensity levels went up and we were able to maintain them.”

Dalo's Hurling Show: Limerick obliterate Tipp, Davy's checkmate, So unKilkenny. Laois embody Eddie

Anthony Daly reviews the hurling weekend with Brian Hogan, TJ Ryan and Ger Cunningham. In association with Renault - car partners of the GAA.