Enda McEvoy: Limerick have an aura. But auras are crafted from glass, one punch shatters them
WINNING FEELING: Limerick’s Gearóid Hegarty celebrates victory oer Waterford. Limerick are favourites and deserve to be.
Obviously there’s only one place where the story of Championship 2021 will end. In Dublin 3 on August 22.
Equally obviously there’s only one place where it can begin. Where we once watched the rowboats landing.
Limerick’s myriad virtues, on the field and in the backroom, brook no further amplification. They have a list of knocks rather than a roll call of injuries, Mike Casey will return in the medium term and the recent general animus towards the All-Ireland champions’ briskness and brusqueness furnishes them with a cause should they choose to employ it. No reason why they shouldn’t either, as long as John Kiely prevents the bonding agent of “they’re all agin’ us” festering into raging paranoia.
What the MacCarthy Cup holders also possess is an aura they’ve worked diligently to cultivate, as all consistently successful teams do. If it’s hard enough to beat All-Ireland champions it’s harder still to beat All-Ireland champions who possess an aura. The problem with auras is that they’re crafted from glass. One punch shatters them.
Limerick’s National League campaign went swimmingly. Two fixtures mattered and they made sure to rap out a message in both, denying Tipperary a victory before hitting Cork with a show of strength from their boys’ brigade. Nothing personal, just a case of getting one’s retaliation in ahead of the Munster semi-final.
Their standard operating procedure hasn’t changed; no reason why it would have. Take your points and the goals will come — and even if they don’t come it probably won’t matter. Whereas Galway took Westmeath for five goals and Cork took them for seven, Limerick hadn’t a green flag raised in Mullingar until the 57th minute. It is who and what they are and it has served them splendidly.
It is also the reason the potential iceberg, as yet invisible but afloat on quiet far-off seas, resembles the one that holed them in 2019. Come a must-win day they’re slightly off their game for the same reasons that even the best teams are slightly off their game from time to time; ergo they create slightly fewer chances than normal; ergo, the Limerick forwards not possessed of the whipcord wrists and internal radar of their Tipp counterparts, they fall short of their usual points quota. The lacuna will not be filled via the medium of goals. Again, it is who and what they are. Still.Â
Limerick are the favourites, they deserve to be and if they’re not taken down by Galway, who during the league placed a premium on carrying the sliotar into the danger zone before pulling the trigger, it’s unlikely they’ll be taken down by anyone.
Common sense ordains otherwise. They all went mad and banged ’em in because it was the last day of school and nobody gave a toss. Such levity will hardly spill over into the opening phase of the championship. The health of too many coaching reputations and the well-being of too many managerial hearts are at stake.
A frictionless championship then, sterile and fought at long range, low on thrills and lower on goals, a suffocating death match between Voltaire’s big battalions? That’s the fear and it’s a horribly real one, while a spike in the number of frees conceded within a yard of the 20-metre line is a gimme.
Yet early patterns can be catching. Think of the number of times the sight of a big gun being spiked by an underdog early on in a competition has encouraged aspirants to dream and led to further upsets.
It may be too much to expect a rush of goals over the next couple of weekends. Man being by necessity a creature of optimism, it is nonetheless not too much to hope for.
Far from being forced to run around after it with one’s tongue hanging out, he asserts, the ball comes to you on a dry summer sod. Tipperary folk worried about the prospects of their older hands coping in July and August will take succour from Callinan’s contention.
Let’s not call closing time on Seamus Callanan (no relation), Padraic Maher, Brendan Maher — patently a Tipp manager of the future — and Noel McGrath just yet, therefore. Especially not on McGrath, who according to Leo McGough’s statistics has recorded 5-129, 5-114 of it from play, in 55 championship outings. On 51 of those occasions he’s scored from play. There are many adjectives for said feats. Here’s one.
Phenomenal.
In his first couple of intercounty seasons he threatened to become a regular goalscorer from deep. It never came to pass because McGrath didn’t quite have the ego for it. For that reason, to hold there were days when Tipperary lost and he didn’t drag them over the line is not untrue but misses the point.
It is not the kind of player or person McGrath is. He does not rouse himself to the level of white fury that impelled Ring in the 1946 All-Ireland final or Shefflin in the 2012 drawn encounter. One can only assume he was the most placid of babies who never cost Mrs Mary McGrath a night’s sleep.
Less than a handful of modern forwards have managed to hurl the same game every day they took the field.
Eoin Larkin was one; McGrath is another. The refrigerated decision-making, the placing of the sliotar to maximum effect, the aversion to ball tricks and self-indulgence, the simple point consummated over and over again (you’ve seen in McGrath’s case how over time they’ve stacked up into Eiffel Tower proportions), the subordination of the individual for the good of the commonweal. The thinking man’s thinking men.
Tipperary fans are entitled to worry this summer alright — to worry about whether the youngsters will rise to the occasion if and when called upon.
Whatever about the kids, the oul’ lads like McGrath (a positively ancient 30) will be alright.
Sounds good, not to mention long overdue, but it begs the question of what happens when they get the ball up as far as the middle of the field and are then faced with obstacles such as, say, a packed Wexford defence. At which juncture we’ll see if New Kilkenny lasts longer than Edwin Poots.
We’ll also see if they have a puckout strategy that entails any component more complicated than Eoin Murphy lorrying the sliotar down the field as long and hard as he can. That’ll be interesting too.
For all the fuss about the overreliance on TJ Reid the county’s real problem is located in defence, as indicated by the leakage of three goals at home to Antrim and four in Ennis.
As the events of last autumn demonstrated, Brian Cody’s ability to get boots on the ground, to send out a team to do — or at any rate to tackle — a given job on a given day, remains undimmed. Nor should it be forgotten that he’s been compromised by the absence of All-Ireland U21/U20 silverware since 2008.
If Kilkenny won the 2020 Leinster title against the head thanks to two moments of individual brilliance from two men of brilliance, however, they lost huge leads — no need to invoke Wilde on the subject — against Dublin and Waterford thanks to a collective inability to vary their approach. When Plan A fails, see Plan A. Obviously. Deploying a seventh defender to protect the lead in those two games would have been a declaration of flexibility, not an admission of weakness, but hey, that’s not the way we do things around here.
At an oblique level this championship can be viewed as a referendum on Cody’s continued stewardship. If Kilkenny fail again they must fail better.
They generated more green flags than anyone else during the league and that constituted a start, not least because becoming a goalscoring team was their only path towards having a shot at taking down Limerick. Get in close and unsheathe the dagger wielded by Seanie Leary, Fitzgibbon, Charlie McCarthy and countless others of blessed memory.
Is it difficult to see Cork beating the champions in what would be the most predictable of surprises before failing in the Munster final? Not a bit of it, but that would be to get ahead of ourselves. For now it’s all about, and can only be about, Thurles, July 3.
Dessie Hutchinson. As a newcomer descending from space, or at any rate from Brighton and Hove, he fared far better than might have been expected last autumn. Although the possibility of second-season syndrome is an obvious hazard, the boost to Waterford’s chances should he train on would be immense — and this year’s Hutchinson model ought to have a greater appreciation of the dimensions of the field, be more judicious when it comes to timing his runs and so forth. After a wet and unhelpful May his hauls of 1-3 against Galway and 2-2 versus Tipp suggest a player who’ll be hopping off the top of the ground.
The only team other than Limerick who can be like Limerick are Galway. Everyone else will have to be themselves. Such an ask won’t be enough for most of them. Sorry for being unromantic but come August the silverware should end up on Corribside or by the broad majestic Shannon. That’s enough to be going on with for the moment.
