Enda McEvoy: Limerick will win by being Limerick. No elaboration required

HITCHING A RIDE: Mike Casey of Limerick in action against Colin Fennelly of Kilkenny during the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship Semi-Final match between Kilkenny and Limerick at Croke Park in Dublin. Pic: Daire Brennan/Sportsfile
Look, it’s straightforward. If Limerick have enough left in the tank they win.
Three in a row. Four in five. One defeat in 18 championship knockout matches. The men who fed a starving county. The second great team of the newish century.
If they haven’t, well… But either way there is a discussion to be had, where before the 2021 All-Ireland final there was none. For which may the Lord make us truly thankful.
Look too at the identity of their opponents. The striped ones. Young, scrappy and hungry. Race memory, low cunning,
, 36 All-Irelands worth of course and distance, plus likelier to nail late chances of the sort Galway missed a fortnight ago. Brilliant footballers also.Such qualities will not suffice by themselves. Goes without saying. Should the MacCarthy Cup holders leave the window unbolted again, however, all bets are off.
Imagine if five years of being Kiely’s Limerick, with the monstrous expenditure of physical and mental energy entailed, renders the champions vulnerable at the death on a scorching afternoon and Kilkenny keep going till the last syllable of recorded time. Or if another ball flops back down off the upright, as happened last Sunday week, and here it’s not Mike Casey it serendipities to but one of the other crowd.
Enough hypothesising. The first issue to be tackled concerns the validity of the 2022 championship formbook. Is she a deceitful hussy or at any rate economical with the truth, and if the latter to what extent?
The Munster final was terrific but following the All Ireland semi-finals there’s a slight asterisk against it. The Leinster final looked terrible but now, despite its myriad imperfections, it stands as a valid contest, an item of substance.
Shake the snow globe and a different vista emerges. Limerick saw off a seasonal-high performance from Clare and a seasonal-high performance from Galway whereas Kilkenny beat an awful Galway and an awfuler Clare. Patently a far stronger line of form.
Yet: should Kilkenny win we’ll conclude that they were better off for not having a gun put to their head by Galway and Clare whereas Limerick were enervated rather than energised by their toils on the road to Croker.
Yet (again): should Limerick win by a few points public opinion will take another half-turn and affirm that the Munster final really was that good, it was just that Clare calved against Kilkenny, and the Leinster final really was that poor, and hey, don’t forget Clare’s 24 wides… Confused? Join the club.
Most All-Ireland hurling deciders are reruns of past showpieces. Kilkenny tomorrow are in the same position that Cork were in 2004 and Limerick themselves in 2018, progressive teams timing their run nicely, their graph line climbing. Limerick’s graph line has either plateaued or is dropping slightly. But the distance between the two lines at the start of the championship was yawning – too much so, on the face of it, to be bridged in the space of one championship.
As Clare’s subsequent demise demonstrated there is something of the succubus, if not of Dracula himself, about Kiely’s charges. If they don’t quite drain their enemies’ blood they certainly empty them of their life force. How to explain the decline in their scoring rate (six goals in seven outings), then?
Is it that Limerick’s victories have been narrow because they’ve consciously been doing just enough, husbanding their resources for a seven-fixture 1,500m race as opposed to the four-match sprint of last season? Or that their victories have been narrow because the absence of Cian Lynch has robbed them of their spell-caster and the ice is consequently thinning?
It’s not just Lynch. As well as the dual Hurler of the Year they’ve been without their ram-raiding monster of a left-half back and the corner forward who landed five points in the first half of the All-Ireland final last season.
They’re not the team they were 12 months ago; they cannot be. They’ve compensated by continually finding a way to win, as champions always do, and they still possess a change of gear.
While their scoring rate has dipped it has not plunged. They are not visibly leaking oil the way Kilkenny were in 2004 or Galway were in 2018. Nobody is wildly out of form. A small increase in output per man would elevate the bottom line substantially.
One obvious advantage here is their ability to make the sliotar stick up top. Kilkenny’s full-forward line lacks both a physical threat and a scoring threat. Limerick’s, with Aaron Gillane – averaging just short of five points from play per game in the championship – and Seamus Flanagan, does not.
Against that the challengers have Adrian Mullen, the scorer of 0-4 in the 2019 semi-final, tanking up and down the right flank, the latest in the marque of classic Kilkenny wing-forwards going back through Billy Fitzpatrick to Jim Langton and beyond. They are a species for whom everything looks easy and nothing is forced. And two weeks ago Eoin Cody showed – who knew? - what he can do when his team mates give him the ball.
The Leinster champions are loaded with front-foot defenders. Butler, Lawlor, Carey, Deegan. Do Limerick still have the appetite for people running at them and into them? Even if Kilkenny by and large lack the height and heft of Galway?
Richie Reid’s deliveries against Clare bristled with length and line and ideal weight of whip. Getting Reid turning towards his own goal will be Kyle Hayes’s task.
At midfield Conor Browne has never been accused of being a Lory Meagher impressionist but he’ll get stuck in and against Limerick you can never have enough lads who get stuck in. It is harder to see Cian Kenny being allowed flourish as per the semi-final. Paddy Deegan invariably fronts up, and is exactly his manager’s kind of defender, but in possession must take more care of the sliotar.
Some other observations.
July 17th is at least three weeks too early as an All Ireland final date.
We didn’t require the sight a fortnight ago of Sean Finn holding off Conor Cooney to defuse that late hand grenade, like the world’s coolest bomb disposal expert, to wonder if has there ever been a better right-corner back. [Adopts Taylor Swift voice]
Equally it is hard to think of a finer pair of goalies than tomorrow’s custodians. It would be apposite if one of them ended up the match winner.The 2022 Munster championship was an entity in which no fewer than three teams produced at least two abysmal performances apiece. Far from needing more Munster teams in the All-Ireland series we may need fewer of them.
One can own no All-Ireland medals, a la George O’Connor, and richly deserve a first. One can own many All-Ireland medals, a la TJ Reid, and richly deserve yet another.
From the point of view of hot favourites, a good injury scare the week of an All Ireland final rarely goes astray in terms of deflating bubbles and concentrating minds. Except when it involves Cian Lynch.
Tom Morrissey, who has a good record in Croke Park, was off-key last time out. Diarmaid Byrnes’s freetaking radar was slightly out of register in his past two appearances. Don’t expect a continuance on either count.
To our usual All-Ireland parlour game as to the identity of the Agatha Christie-esque unlikely suspect who’ll be the hero of the hour. At this stage there are no Limerick players remaining to be classed as unlikely suspects. For Kilkenny, perhaps Billy Ryan, or else someone off the bench to score a winning goal.
The odds are that Limerick will create more shooting chances and miss more thereof. Perform close to their best and they ought to get away with driving 15 wides. Kilkenny will not get away with more than, say, nine wides.
Pundits love to prattle about how matches were won by some dazzling tactical legerdemain the losers never saw coming. Not this match. We know what we’ll get.
Limerick will win by being Limerick. No elaboration required. Kilkenny’s To Do list is understandably longer.
Outhunger and outwork the opposition. Keep the space between their own full-back and half-back lines compressed inasmuch as possible. Prevent the Limerick defenders coming out with the ball, especially Barry Nash sallying up the field to offer himself as a scoring outlet. Fashion the room to get shots off from 60 metres, as Galway planned for and achieved. Beat Nickie Quaid twice.
It’s a 60/40 affair. A classic case of the favourites should win, the challengers could win. And go on, admit it: the longer the week went on, the more of a shout you were giving Kilkenny.
Better against Galway than against Wexford and better against Clare than against Galway, the undercats could produce a season-high display and still fetch up three or four points adrift. They are one, maybe two forwards short.
That said, a couple of the forwards on the bench are as good as the forwards who’ll start. They haven’t been playing the short- and medium-range stick passing game as long or as confidently as Limerick have, though.
That bit about most hurling finals being reruns?
On a sweltering day half a century ago Kilkenny ran the legs off the favourites and Munster champions in the closing quarter by saving their fitness for Croke Park.
Another historical fact is that six years later Cork consummated their three in a row by beating Kilkenny. Every box ticked.
The stage is set for Limerick to do likewise. Greatness beyond dispute.