Anthony Daly: With the scent of championship in the air, teams can’t hold back in this league
At some time in the late 1980s, Clare played Galway in a challenge game in Whitegate. It was a nice spin from Ennis but it was an ideal venue for a challenge game between the counties as the east Clare club nestles close to the Galway border, with Woodford, home to the Tommy Larkins club, and then Galway manager Cyril Farrell, just a handful of miles over the road.
Ger ‘Sparrow’ O’Loughlin was just on the scene at the time and I got a spin over to watch him play. At one stage, ‘Sparrow’ and Pete Finnerty were chasing this ball out near the sideline and their momentum took them head-first into the stand, with the two boys ending up in the second row of seating.
The bould Pete was never going to turn down the opportunity to shove out his barrel-chest and put manners on some young fella so he started grappling with ‘Sparrow’. Victor O’Loughlin, ‘Sparrow’s brother and certainly no shrinking violet, was on his way to wade-in on the action when Sylvie Linnane ran out from the corner-back position.
In my own head, I was thinking, ‘Jeez, here comes Sylvie, it’s all really going to kick off now, there will be all-out war here’.
The war-maker though, suddenly turned into the peace-maker.
‘Lads, stop, stop, ‘tis the heat, ‘tis the heat, I’m telling ye.’
It was a roasting hot evening and maybe the sun and the red hair had turned Sylvie’s usual thought process inside-out. Yet I still knew what he was thinking; the summer is long enough for waging war.
We’ve all been involved in winter skirmishes and spring war zones, but it’s still only on the real hot days that tempers rage and the blood boils. We’re not used to league hurling in summer but I don’t think teams can be, or will be, holding much back during this league when the scent and sulphur of championship hurling is already in the air.
The last time I played a league game in the summer was in May 1997, when Tipperary came to town for a crucial match. The league was restructured that year, but our minds had already turned towards summer once the sun was high in the sky and the ball was zipping off the Cusack Park turf.
That match was like an extended scene from Apocalypse Now. Ger Loughnane said in his book that it was ‘the dirtiest match’ he ever saw. It was. I remember on numerous occasions, when the ball was the down the other end of the field, and hearing belting off-the-ball going on at different stages all around me.
That stuff doesn’t go on anymore, but the game is every bit as ferocious now in terms of the intensity of the body hits and collisions. I remember the last time RTÉ covered the Limerick-Tipperary league fixture in the Gaelic Grounds, in February 2019, when you could hardly see the pitch with a thick fog. It was biting cold. Ground temperatures were below zero but the ferocity was savage. Some of the tackles were bone-crushing. Standing on the sideline that evening, the ground was nearly shaking anytime the players came near us.
With guys not having played a game now in 5-6 months, I expect the intensity of the hits to be through the roof this evening, and right across the weekend.
Is that stuff sustainable? Are guys conditioned yet to be able to do that week in, week out? I think they are but the proximity of some fixtures so close to the championship means that there will naturally be some shadow-boxing.
On the other hand, I only envisage so much of that stuff, especially when there are only a handful of teams meeting in the league that are guaranteed to lock horns in the championship.
Cork-Waterford is a classic example. Both have more than enough to do to meet in a Munster final. From Cork’s perspective, they’ll surely be gunning to right some of the wrongs from their championship performance against Waterford last October. Yet I can’t see why Waterford won’t be giving it an unmerciful shot either, especially when the last game they played was an All-Ireland final trimming from Limerick.
Winning every game they played last year didn’t do Limerick any harm and I expect John Kiely to go with the same formula again this season. Last year’s league game in Thurles was a brilliant contest but, considering Limerick have whacked Tipperary in their last two championship matches (the 2019 Munster final and last year’s semi-final), Liam Sheedy and his gang should be hell-bent on some form of atonement here too. In that context, those two matches should be crackers this weekend.
Tipp won’t be holding back but they’ll be met head on. There are only five league games after all, while Limerick will have only four games to win the All-Ireland if they go the direct route. I don’t think Limerick know any other way than to just go full steam ahead. And the train is all the easier again to drive with such competition stoking the fire.
Every county has great opportunities to have a right cut nearly every weekend they play.
Of course, there will be times when counties will be holding back, but that will be more than counter-balanced by the volume of occasions when counties will want to drop the pedal and just take off. With the championship so close, teams will be craving momentum in the league.
Some matches will demand far more. After all the media attention and hype around Clare and the Fitzgeralds recently, imagine the intrigue when Davy Fitz will bring his Wexford side to Cusack Park next weekend? If crowds could go, it would be all-ticket. Either way, it will be box-office.
There will be some saucy contests but there are also numerous new angles to this campaign; the new rules, the warm weather and good pitches, so many games on live TV.
More subs also opens it up more for everyone, and not just for injury prevention. In the past, players would go off to league games knowing full well that they hadn’t a hope of getting game-time. When I was Dublin manager, not only did I know certain lads wouldn’t play, but I knew they had probably arrived at that same conclusion themselves before they even boarded the bus.
The sums were easy to calculate by looking around at who else was on the bench, and more likely to get the call to arms.
With a rolling subs-bench though, everyone on the match-day squad now knows that they have a great chance of getting game-time. And if they impress, they might secure a starting jersey a week later.
There is no point trying to predict results because nobody — even the teams themselves — have any clue how they are going.
Apart from there being no pre-season competitions or challenge games, lads are trying to go from 0-70 within the space of three weeks. No matter how hard lads have trained individually since January, the only way you can really gauge form is by playing competitive matches. And you can’t replicate that intensity in training matches with less than 21 days of collective preparation.
There is still an element of unknown with this league. But we’ll all have a truer picture of what’s really coming over the next few weeks by Sunday evening.
