Enda McEvoy: A great team deserving of the most glorious coronation ceremony

No frigid December afternoon in an empty, sterile house, this, nor even a half-full Croke Park in August. Here instead was the day John Kiely’s Limerick were created, moulded, honed and Kinnerked for.
Enda McEvoy: A great team deserving of the most glorious coronation ceremony

COLOSSUS: Limerick's Gearoid Hegarty and goalkeeper Eoin Murphy of Kilkenny after the game. ©INPHO/James Crombie

Great teams deserve great coronations. Yesterday Limerick finally had theirs.

Marching bands. Cheering crowds. Blazing weather. Colour and ceremony. Pomp and circumstance.

No frigid December afternoon in an empty, sterile house, this, nor even a half-full Croke Park in August. Here instead was the day John Kiely’s Limerick were created, moulded, honed and Kinnerked for.

Best of all, this was no hollow crown but rather a signal triumph against worthy opponents who coursed them all the way to the finishing line.

Three in a row. Four in five. The hay saved. Kilkenny bet. The second great hurling team of the 21st century.

No Cian Lynch present, it is true, yet if Hamlet cannot be staged without the depressive Dane, Kiely’s charges are perfectly capable of doing their thing without their own sweet prince. Not quite the same magic, no. Nowhere near the same quota of moments that elevate bums off seats.

But champions always find a way. An ability to solve problems and find new answers is one of the things that make them champions.

There wasn’t a moment when it didn’t look like they’d win. Not when Kilkenny, having spent the first half hanging in there and doing very well to have managed that much, pounced for a first goal to make a game of it. Not when they bagged a second and moments later John Donnelly brought them level.

The response to Billy Ryan’s goal was a point from Gearoid Hegarty. The response to Donnelly’s point was three on the bounce from Tom Morrissey, Diarmaid Byrnes – those laser-guided long-range bombs of his are like little Dementors, sapping the spirit of the opposition – and Morrissey again.

Limerick kept throwing punches. It is what they do. They usually throw more punches than the other crowd and it suffices.

And when they don’t throw more punches, as against Galway in the semi-final, such is the breadth and depth of institutional knowledge they’ve acquired under Kiely that they know what to do when the match is on the line. The right thing, the simple thing, the thing that hour upon hour of coaching has hardwired them to do.

Five points behind with four minutes of injury time to come, Kilkenny hit three scores to make it a two-point affair. They had time enough to conjure an improbable winning goal and because that is the kind of trick that Kilkenny teams specialise in, and have since the mists of time, they might well have pulled it off against some other poor eejits.

Not against these guys though.

The challengers were ever in need of goals. The champions were never in need of anything but points.

By every reasonable metric Limerick were bigger, stronger and better than their opponents. Thus the only question that mattered centred on whether they’d bring their A game, and get boots on the ground, or whether they might possibly have contrived – somehow, who knows? – to miscalibrate their training and arrive at Croke Park overripe.

They hadn’t. That was that and all the rest was noise.

They also had Gearoid Hegarty, which tends to help. One trusts that Hegarty will not object to having certain cyborgian qualities imputed to him. Off the field he is doubtless the most engaging of young men, full of the milk of human kindness; on it he is the hurling equivalent of the T-1000 in the second Terminator film.

Relentless, remorseless, unkillable. He just keeps feckin’ going.

He landed his team’s concluding score when materialising on his own half-back line, taking a hit from David Blanchfield, shrugging him off, steadying himself and splitting the posts from somewhere down near Parnell Square.

For the closing sequence of the proceedings he popped up in the left corner as Limerick tried to corral the sliotar in the position of minimum danger. Relentless. Remorseless.

Yet waxing about Hegarty’s physical wherewithal risks doing an injustice to the other elements of his game. He scored two points in the opening half that can only be described as astounding, the first when from wide on the right in the middle of the field he not so much drove the ball between the uprights as tickled it with the lightest, most feathery of touches and picture-postcard follow-through. It didn’t barely clear the crossbar either but sailed over it.

He is a poster boy for the distance that good coaching, application and the desire for self-betterment can take an enthusiastic young hurler not obviously over-endowed with skill.

It is in the way of All Ireland finals that many a pre-match straw in the wind counts for nothing come throw-in.

Much was made last week of the height disparity between the Limerick full-forward line and their markers. Nothing came of it. Kilkenny did not lose the game in their full-back line.

Clare’s 24 wides in the semi-final did imply something about Kilkenny’s lack of pressure on the ball in the middle 40 metres of the field, however. That mattered here.

There will be no prolonged postmortem on Noreside nonetheless. There is no need for one. There never is when challengers give great champions plenty of it and eventually succumb.

What is there to investigate? No other team in the country gets within an ass’s roar of posting 2-26 against yesterday’s Limerick performance.

As ever in these situations the underdogs needed just about everything to go right for them and a few bits and bobs to go wrong for their opponents. Above all, given the way the share of the possession was bound to break, Kilkenny needed Limerick to have one of their sloppy shooting days - and Limerick didn’t.

Ten wides apiece where the Leinster champions couldn’t under any circumstances afford more than eight and could have done with the holders driving 14 or 15. But Limerick, having got their eye in at Croke Park a fortnight ago, kept the leakage to a respectable level. That mattered too.

The warning expressed here on Saturday came to pass. The men in stripes were one, perhaps two forwards short, and ruinously so in the opening quarter when their puckout strategy collapsed. The full-forward line couldn’t make the sliotar stick and Declan Hannon, far from being obliged to face his own uprights, was able to tidy up and stroll out of defence.

Walter Walsh should have been sent on ten minutes before half-time to provide some purchase up front. When he did come on he changed the rhythm for 15 minutes. What had at times looked in danger of becoming a procession transmogrified into an immensely satisfying contest.

That his team were little short of magnificent in defeat given their myriad imperfections will, it need hardly be added, be of scant consolation to Brian Cody. He’ll have taken some satisfaction from the fact of a seasonal-best display but only some. Defeat in an All Ireland final ever tastes of ashes and wormwood and this was his and his county’s third in succession.

So the pack closed on Limerick, as might have been expected, but didn’t overhaul them, as was also expected.

A great team and a glorious coronation ceremony. Every box ticked.

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