Anthony Daly: You just sense Limerick are ready for whatever Tipp bring

SHOW OF STRENGTH: Gearóid Hegarty gets a shot away in the 2019 Munster SHC final, a game Anthony Daly feels Limerick bossed. Tipperary will be out for revenge tomorrow. Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

I was fortunate enough to win two All-Irelands as a player. I know full well how hard it is to win that precious medal, especially as we won both of those finals by margins of two points and one point. There will always be close calls and lucky breaks along the way, but the best team always wins the All-Ireland.

Human nature will always muscle in on that theory, especially for teams which felt they should have won it.

Tipperary were the best team in the country in 2019, but, human nature being as it is, there are more teams than just Limerick which place an asterisk beside their All-Ireland win of two years ago.

I certainly don’t because Tipperary only lost one game that year, whereas Limerick lost three — to Cork, Tipp (albeit a dead-rubber round-robin game in Munster), and Kilkenny. But the one game Tipp did lose is the source of any lingering doubt because of the manner of the defeat, and how much Limerick bossed, bullied, and hammered Tipp in that year’s Munster final.

I was on duty for RTÉ that afternoon and, being honest, it was nearly embarrassing for Tipp for a finish. Limerick just wiped the floor with them.

That game couldn’t finish quickly enough for Tipp because the Limerick crowd were hyped up on a cocktail of delirium and giddiness, where every Limerick score was like another laceration on Tipp’s skin.

Tipp could argue that they just let the game off once it went away from them. Having a backdoor does grant that licence, but if Tipp wanted to show that match was a once-off, and that Limerick don’t have their number, they didn’t do a whole lot to disprove that theory in last year’s Munster semi-final in Cork.

At this stage, Limerick are far more comfortable in the relationship — if you want to call it that — than Tipp are.

When the sides met in the opening round of the league back in May, John Kiely ambled up to myself, Joanne Cantwell, and Henry Shefflin when we were on the sideline for RTÉ duty, for a chat beforehand.

Kiely had that relaxed demeanour about him throughout the game whereas the most animated man in the Gaelic Grounds that evening was Liam Sheedy.

That is Liam’s style but, while the sides drew the game, you just felt that Limerick got a lot more out of the game from having invested a lot less in the match than Tipp had.

I’d say John learned a lot more than Liam did too that evening. Limerick didn’t have as much training done as Tipp but Kiely also probably realised that Limerick, including John, can’t do half-baked.

On the other hand, Tipp were fully baked but they still couldn’t beat Limerick.

It wasn’t pretty that evening. Tipp set up very defensively, especially on puckouts. Their whole set-up for that match was the polar opposite of how Tipp played against Clare two weeks ago when they were back to their swashbuckling best, manically hunting for goals. Tipp got three goals but they could have had at least five only for some excellent goalkeeping from Eibhear Quilligan.

We’ve all seen at this stage how false the league was but, aside from Tipp only creating one half-goal chance that evening against Limerick from Jake Morris, maybe Sheedy has decided that the only way to take Limerick down is to go into the trenches with them.

You’d imagine that Limerick would win that battle all day long but maybe Liam’s theory — and I could be totally wrong here — is to keep it as tight for as long as Tipp can before moving the artillery higher up the battle-ground and unloading the full arsenal in the last quarter.

Limerick will be ready for whatever Tipp bring. They didn’t play as well as they would have liked against Cork, but they still won by eight points. Limerick’s inside forward line didn’t function as well as they’d have expected that afternoon, while their two best players last year — Gearóid Hegarty and Tom Morrissey — were quieter than they’d been since the 2019 All-Ireland semi-final.

I’m sure Tipp will have looked at how Cork nullified those players, but Kiely will be demanding a lot more from some of his main men. Tipp will certainly come with all guns blazing but I fancy Limerick to silence them.

I have to hold my hand up and admit that I was one of the many people writing off Dublin earlier in the year.

I just felt they blew too many opportunities to win games they should have won, but, looking back now, Mattie Kenny was always really positive after every league game.

Nobody ever really knows if a manager fully believes what the public thinks he’s saying but Mattie clearly has a system of play which he fully believes in and trusts. I may have been slow to give Mattie full credit with Dublin in the past, but I’ve always felt that any manager which wins successive All-Ireland club titles, especially with a Dublin club, has to have something special about him.

Mattie showed that tactical nous and intelligence against Galway with how he set his team up, and how they went after Galway’s big guns, and shut them down.

Part of that may have been down to Galway’s attitude but that’s being over-simplistic too because Dublin were by far the better team throughout the 70 minutes.

In any big game, having your big players right is absolutely paramount, especially your tone-setters. Eoghan O’Donnell is the best full-back in the country. I’ll also stick my neck on the line and say that Con O’Callaghan is the best full-forward in the country, even though he’s never played senior inter-county hurling. Imagine if Dublin had Con? They have O’Donnell but he’s unlikely to play this evening unless he has made a miraculous recovery from a hamstring injury picked up against Galway.

Kilkenny would have been favourites anyway, but O’Donnell’s loss completely alters the dynamic, especially when you look at the form Eoin Cody was in against Wexford. Scoring 2-37 (albeit after extra-time) was in stark contrast to the 1-18 Dublin managed against Galway but Dublin will take great confidence from the manner in how they stymied such a high-profile Galway attack. Some of Galway’s best forwards barely even had the ball in their hand over the 70 minutes. Conor Burke and Liam Rushe control that Dublin system across the half-back line, but I just think Kilkenny will have enough to secure the victory.

In any other weekend, Clare-Wexford would be an absolute standout match, because of far more reasons than being the pick of the qualifiers, but even more so because of the recent history and heated background which has stoked this game into a furnace of hype, controversy and expectation.

There are still burning embers from last year’s qualifiers when Davy Fitzgerald claimed he was verbally abused by a member of the Clare backroom team. The enmity between Fitzy and Brian Lohan has been a talking point for years now but everything has gone to a whole new level since the sides’ league meeting in May, and the massive Covid-19 fallout afterwards.

Wexford can make all the claims they like about the HSE identifying two Clare players as close contacts after the game but it’s very hard for people outside the county to understand how hurt everyone in Clare was after that incident.

How could two Clare players be picked out when a large group of players and management spent most of the weekend together?

If any of the Clare players were thinking that they wanted to beat Wexford badly last year in support of their manager, how badly do they want to win this one now? If I was a Clare player, I would be doing absolutely everything in my power to make sure this game is won. I fancy Clare.

When you look at the huge pressure on Fitzy and Lohan today, and then you see how much heat Waterford’s fixture against Laois has taken off Liam Cahill — especially after Waterford’s below-par display against Clare — it further underlines how wrong the whole system is.

How much is today’s Clare-Wexford game going to take out of the winners for Round 2 of the qualifiers next weekend? It’s an absolute disgrace that both teams’ prize for having already won a game, and to have almost won a second championship match, is to then get each other.

No disrespect to Laois but I don’t understand why Waterford, who were well beaten by Clare, can draw Laois and have a much less taxing path to Round 2 than the Clare team which effectively hammered them.

Wexford annihilated Laois and performed heroically against Kilkenny but what was all that worth to them? On the other hand, Cork and Galway didn’t win any game, but they still got a bye to the next round.

With the vast number of hammerings and one-sided games in the football championship, especially in a knockout championship this year, the main thrust of the football debate this summer has focused on the need for a tiered system, or systems.

We have that in hurling, with the Joe McDonagh Cup, the Christy Ring and Lory Meagher. We have the best 10 (11 this year) teams in the Liam MacCarthy Cup.

We have everything that football doesn’t have. And yet, we can still often get it wrong in hurling when it comes to qualifier draws.