Enda McEvoy: This is the first real test of the alleged New Kilkenny
Kilkenny boss Brian Cody, whose team may be in the throes of a massive and long overdue stylistic rewiring job. What is for certain is that their improved use of the ball during the league convulsed hurling’s netherworld of analysts and statisticians. Picture: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
So here we are, after a series of non-events that masqueraded as a National League campaign, after one or two prep races that featured transparent non-triers and after last weekend’s provincial quarter-finals that doubled as Chinese takeaways, quickly consumed and instantly forgotten. It’s as though the opening day of Cheltenham has dawned at last. Anddddd they’re off!
We’ll begin with two gentlemen who, like Bonucci, Chiellini and the poor, will always be with us. As of 4.29 on Saturday afternoon the championship record between Davy Fitz’s Wexford and Brian Cody’s Kilkenny reads two wins for the former, one for the latter and one draw. Don’t imagine for a moment that Davy doesn’t derive immense secret satisfaction from said state of affairs. Don’t imagine for even half a moment that Cody isn’t totally and utterly affronted by it.
The parameters of some hurling rivalries change over time as stocks rise in one county while falling in another. The circularity of this particular relationship was set in stone in the 1950s, Kilkenny holding the upper hand, but every once in a while, with clockwork regularity, Wexford producing a team that has a window of opportunity to beat the neighbours as frequently, and preferably by as much (a la 1976), as they can.
The current window opened at Wexford Park in 2017 on the evening Davy was stuck behind that green door without Shakin’ Stevens. That it has not yet shut says something about his ability to keep extracting juice from an increasingly shrivelled looking orange and says more about Kilkenny’s inability to assemble anything remotely resembling a potential All-Ireland-winning team.
A recent scientific study suggested the possible existence of up to 10^10^16 (yes, quite) parallel universes. In only one of them are the men in stripes regarded as 4/9 shots on Saturday. This one, inexplicably.
Fair enough, maybe Kilkenny are indeed in the throes of a massive and long overdue stylistic rewiring job. What is for certain is that their improved use of the ball during the league convulsed hurling’s netherworld of analysts and statisticians.
The boffins were intrigued by, in the words of one of their number, the sight of Kilkenny “shapeshifting into a modern hurling team” and were beside themselves with eagerness to learn the identity of the man who authored the change in strategy.
Eschewing the two-yard tap-in that inevitably arises — ie we can at least be pretty sure of the identity of the man who hasn’t uthored the change in strategy — it’s no harm to point out that being located in patently the easier group in Division One offered the ideal laboratory conditions for experimentation without fear of test tubes exploding in one’s face. It also has to be pointed out that Kilkenny conceded three goals to Antrim, who failed to lay a glove on Dublin last weekend.
In other words, Saturday is the first real test of the alleged New Kilkenny. If they’re still pinging angled deliveries around in the other half of the field come the closing 10 minutes, we can conclude that the change in approach is real and may stick. Not till then, though.
The switch from Portlaoise to Croke Park is good news for both but better news for Wexford, whose running game demands great tracts of veldt. (Yes, yes — there’s little or nothing between the two pitches in terms of dimensions but Croke Park plays bigger.) Their recent defeat in Nowlan Park can be dismissed, ditto their victory there against Laois seven days ago. You thought, by the by, it was daft last autumn for Clare to hit 1-23 against Limerick and lose by 10 points? Last weekend Laois hit the same 1-23 and lost by 20 points.Â
No apologies for beating the drum once more: this is too silly for words and it cannot be good for the game. Half of the intrigue with Loughnane’s Clare, aside from the frisson of wondering what yer man would do or say next, was watching them sweat blood in the attempt to reach the 20-point mark.
Wexford have their own causes for concern. The freetaking issue has never been solved; while Mikie Dwyer looks a promising newcomer he’ll probably require another season to get up to championship pace; and they’re likely to start 13 of the 15 that started the 2019 Leinster final. It is one or two too many. But it is where they are.
The furry ones may well have a longer summer in front of them than Wexford do. It doesn’t render Saturday afternoon anything less than a 50-50 affair.
If Kilkenny, charged with funnelling clean water through the desert to an oasis, face an intellectual challenge, Cork face both an intellectual challenge and a physical one. They won’t succeed on the former count if they do not break even on the latter.
That they will not win without scoring more goals — at least two more — than Limerick scarcely requires assertion. Think of it as one of those heist movies where the loot is stashed away in a bank vault surrounded by a forcefield of interlocking laser beams.
Cork must create a latticework of passes off the stick and from the hand that will get them past the sensors without tripping the alarm, all while being belaboured by a bunch of green-uniformed security guards. None of which can happen without razor hand-eye coordination or support play so rigorously rehearsed as to appear telepathic, not to mention the heft to generate possession in the first place and the upper body strength to break the tackle and force one or two sin bins.
Whatever about their chances of channelling the spirit of the 1990 All-Ireland final, a definite item on the to-do list will entail clearing sufficient space to afford Mark Coleman, the man who turns the key in the car, time to sculpt his deliveries and/or break forward and light the fire. The MacCarthy Cup holders’ first responder here will be Cian Lynch, so good at tidying up the bits and pieces. For all his sleight of wrist and lightness of foot Lynch is, like Gandalf, not some conjuror of cheap tricks. He always has a purpose to his work and it’s always selfless.
Yet if Limerick are blessed to have him, he by the same token is fortunate to be a member of this particular Shannonside iteration. In a mediocre side he’d be floundering, trying to do the right thing surrounded by colleagues not quite on his level, and Lynch in a mediocre side would be an eyesore.
This lot, who are far from mediocre, look well set to retain their titles. If anything, with Mike Casey expected back in the medium term, they look almost too well set.
A clean bill of health is not necessarily a blessing. Last year Casey’s absence led to some desirable creative tension. Kiely and Kinnerk had to find a replacement; they had to coach him in the position; they had to rejig the team; they had to think both laterally and in straight lines. Limerick were all the better as a result. Change murders complacency.
In that regard the Galway of 2018 will endure as a yardstick of sorts for entering the All-Ireland final with the same 14 outfielders from the previous year. They couldn’t all have been going as well again — and lo, it turned out they weren’t.
Talking of Galway, they’ll have enough hurling to dispose of Dublin. It’s Croke Park, not Parnell Park, and the visitors possess the kind of essential — for prospective champions — incisiveness the locals do not.
On Sunday, Clare will be better off for beating Waterford by four points than if they’d put 20 points on them, as Tipperary on one of their nine-dart finish days unquestionably would have. Still, a theme with Tipp over the past 10 years has been that on afternoons when they’re viewed as being vulnerable — like here — they’ve been nothing of the sort.
Whether or not he deploys a deep-lying number 11 in order to bypass John Conlon we’re entitled to expect Liam Sheedy to produce a team bouncing off the ground on their first day out. That’ll do.
And they’re off!
