Enda McEvoy: What kind of tallies will a team have to be posting to win the Pandemic All-Ireland?
Jason Forde of Tipperary turns to celebrate after scoring his side's goal against Cork. Picture: Daire Brennan/Sportsfile
Galway and Tipp at the business end of the championship. Got to be a one-point outcome, right? Perhaps even a no-point outcome.
It’s no slur on the contestants of Saturday’s second fixture to hold that although the winners will thereby be actual All-Ireland semi-finalists, the winners of the first match will not only be actual semi-finalists but also a clear and present danger to Limerick. In the same way, it’s no slur on Kilkenny to hold that were the Leinster final played another 10 times, Galway would win it at least five of those times.
The two efforts that — shades of the 2001 All-Ireland — came back into play off the upright; Eoin Murphy’s save from Jason Flynn, not that the latter did much wrong; Joe Canning eschewing the point from a close-range free. On another evening these breaks go Galway’s way. Next ball etc.
A small caveat re the Canning incident, however. It had an echo about it of what TJ Reid has been attempting from time to time in recent seasons. Remember the Greg Kennedy episode at Nowlan Park last year, which came about because Reid tried to work a goal chance from a tap-over free? He was forcing the issue because he was uncomfortably aware that his team wouldn’t be creating too many further goal chances.
Once Richie Hogan came on seven days ago Kilkenny had someone to turn the key in the last 30 metres. Tipperary have any number of lads who’ll turn the key in the last 30 metres. Galway didn’t.
It doesn’t mean they won’t have them on Saturday if they succeed in getting Conor Whelan and Brian Concannon closer to the opposition uprights and/or allow Canning to drift upfield every so often to start a fire.
For the umpteenth time: this is a coaching issue that can only be rectified on the training field.
To a supplementary question. What kind of tallies will a team have to be posting to win the Pandemic All-Ireland?
Limerick we needn’t worry about. They’re clearly determined to triumph without recourse to green flags, or at any rate without recourse to them as a saline drip, as was the case with Galway in 2017.
Equally clearly, Tipperary and Kilkenny will not reach the Hogan Stand podium on a high-carb diet of points alone; the protein of a couple of goals a game will be necessary.
Someone came out with a corker of a stat the other day. The goalscoring rate to date in Championship 2020 has been the lowest since 1891. Really. This finding prompts another supplementary question. Does such a state of affairs render goals less valuable (because they’ve become an afterthought for so many teams) or more valuable (because of their very rarity and match-turning powers)?
It is not being wise during the event to assert that a winter renewal of the competition was made to suit the big fellas who’ll kick in the door and ask questions later. Everyone said as much beforehand. Yet as we saw in Croke Park and the Gaelic Grounds last weekend, this doesn’t automatically disenfranchise the chaps who’ll look to sneak in through a postern gate while everyone else busy battering away at the castle walls. Maybe the eventual champions will be the team who best strike a happy medium and learn to churn out a couple of 2-23s.
Tipp have the look about them of a bunch who know they need goals – and know they’ll probably get them too, whether with Seamus Callanan slinging passes to his colleagues, a la his assist for Jake Morris in the Limerick game, or vice versa.
That said, Jason Forde’s goal last week had a touch of farce about it. Cork had one overriding task in the second half: keep a clean sheet. In the event Forde had only to beat one defender in order to get in on goal. Limerick would have had the cast of Ben-Hur around him, harrying him and hassling him and holding him up. Galway will do the same.
For all his industry Patrick Maher has always been someone who delights in a summer sod. Up into his paw at the first time of asking and away he goes. Yet the presence of him, Michael Breen - the ultimate horses for courses choice last week in view of the state of the going – and Dan McCormack indicates that Liam Sheedy has decided to fight the battle first, win it afterwards.
Shane O’Neill will take heart from the fact that it wasn’t gone on his charges in 60 seconds last week. Galway summoned a second wind almost instantly. Nor was Canning quite as precise as TJ Reid on the night. That can happen too.
Odds are he’ll have his eye in agaist Tipp.
The other quarter-final similarly falls into the Too Close To Call category. Tony Kelly enters it hurling like he invented the game, codified the rules and is kind-hearted enough to loan the sliotar to his pals every few minutes before getting impatient, taking it back and putting it over the bar.
Along with Cian Lynch the Ballyea man offers joyous proof that the robots have not entirely taken over the sport.
At his best Austin Gleeson can hurl like that too. But it’s been a while since he took a match by the throat and he didn’t do so last Sunday either. Still, if losing to Limerick is this season’s black, Waterford did so with rather more style than Clare or Tipp did.
Mortgage on the line? Tipp, with one of their forwards doing what one of the Tipp forwards usually does, and Waterford.
