Where do Offaly go from here?
The simple answer is down to the second tier Joe McDonagh Cup and out of the Leinster Senior Hurling Championship.
A 17-point defeat to Dublin in this afternoon’s bottom of the table clash confirmed relegation for the four-time All-Ireland champions.
"A hard day at the office," manager Kevin Martin, who took over at the end of last season, told RTÉ Sport.
"We just had no answer in the second half. We’d no energy, we brought in a few subs who did okay.
"The lads did well enough at stages but the whole momentum was gone out of our game at that stage.
"I don’t think [relegation] is going to be better for Offaly hurling but we are gone down there and that’s it.
"We’re going to have to get together and regroup, just train the way we have been training and just try and get build up a bit more and get more developed and win the Joe McDonagh next year.
"The guys are hurting in there...it’s hard to take. They are just fatigued, physically fatigued, mentally fatigued. They are just in bits in there.
"We’ve been down for a good few years and we’re trying to get back up there.
"A lot of this is going to boil down to mental strength and where the lads want to go with this because we know where we want to go as a management team.
"We’ll meet up in a couple of weeks and discuss everything and see where we go from here.
On calls for the relegation system to be looked at again, the Tullamore man said: "It’s all fine having four games in four weeks but our guys just aren’t able for that.
"Other teams like Galway [might be but] even Kilkenny weren’t able for it last week, they fatigued against Galway...the players are amateurs, not professionals, it’s not fair on them."
"It's not going to do Offaly any good going down" - The panel on the possibility of six team provincial championships pic.twitter.com/5GYYaK61YM
— The Sunday Game (@TheSundayGame) June 3, 2018
