Anthony Daly: Kilkenny going all out is your only guarantee
FULL THROTTLE: Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng. Pic: ©INPHO/Laszlo Geczo
LOVE Cheltenham week. Always have. Always will. We closed our pub Murty Browne’s on Tuesday but Wednesday was hopping with the craic from watching and betting on horses with all the customers. Yesterday being St Patrick’s Day was a brilliant way to end such an entertaining week.
Of course it wasn’t all about horses because most of the customers are mad into all sports. Ireland’s Grand Slam quest this afternoon against England dominated much of the discussion. So did the Clare footballers’ relegation struggles ahead of their trip to Owenbeg to take on high-flying Derry.
As for the hurlers’ final regulation game against Cork tomorrow afternoon, it barely registered in the discussion. If it did, it was mostly focused on Shane O’Donnell and whether or not we might see him in a Clare jersey for the first time since last July.
You’ll still have the diehards in Cusack Park but that’s about it. Some fellas will do the maths and come to the logical conclusion, especially a share of husbands. It’s Mother’s Day. Play it safe. Stay at home. If you miss the match, what about it? Are you really going to miss that much?
I fully understand that the hurling league will never have what the football league does. When the regular round of the football league concludes next weekend, you’d need an abacus to work out all the calculations and permutations. The excitement will be gripping and dramatic across all four divisions.
Yet for the hurling league, you don’t even need one finger, never mind one hand, to do the maths. It’s that basic. Of the six matches on show, only one really means anything in terms of deciding the last of the four semi-finalists — Kilkenny versus Waterford.
Even at that, the sums are fairly basic; if Kilkenny draw or win, they’re through; if Waterford win, they make the top four. Wow.
A couple of teams could possibly squeeze into that last four if results went a certain way and scoring differences went haywire. But being honest, nobody is even bothered to work them out. In any case, nobody really cares, including the counties themselves.
It’s sad in so many ways that the league has come to this. On the other hand, hurling people can’t have it every way when the most competitive hurling league imaginable will begin in just over a month. Something has to give.
On our hurling show on the podcast, a few people have come to us with suggestions as to what the GAA could do to spice it all up. One which caught my eye was four groups of three, where everyone would play each other twice — home and away — before the top team in each group would play a semi-final.
I liked the concept but I wouldn’t go that far — I’d just play one game, which would amount to just three league matches for every side in Division 1. Any teams then that want to win the league will go all out as it would only involve five games. And so few matches would also free up more preparatory time ahead of the championship than just the two weeks which exist at the moment. The other alternative is to go back to the old system of Division 1A and 1B. The problem with that format in the past was that it was too intense (but how bad). Everyone wanted to stay in 1A because getting relegated to 1B was a monstrous struggle to get out of the following season when there were so many good teams down there.
I remember when Dublin played the relegation final against Galway in 2012, and the promotion final the following year against Limerick, when both of those games were as tense as championship matches. The only tension in any of the games last weekend (even the exciting Tipperary-Waterford game) was in the Antrim-Laois game — because the match meant something.
Nobody wants to go back to those days when the pressure in the spring is too intense, especially when the pressure in the round robin has become so overbearing. Yet there still has to be a balance found somewhere. Otherwise the league is just going to descend into a complete farce. The harshest critics of the competition would say it already has.
It’s got so bad that anyone involved in the Fantasy Hurling League is thankful that there is an embargo on transfers until before the semi-finals. Nobody could have any faith in a transfer system now because you have no clue what state of mind any player is in when the games they are playing have so little at stake.
LAYERS trying to put up their hands for a championship jersey will be bursting themselves but you couldn’t be sure that any experienced players will be. And they are the lads you’re normally looking to buy to accumulate points and drive you up the Fantasy table. Looking at the poverty of the Clare performance last week, I ended up asking myself if the Clare attitude changed when watching the Tipperary-Waterford match on Saturday evening? Aside from Tipp looking so impressive, the Clare lads had a fair idea that if they beat Galway, and Cork, that they’d possibly be looking at a league semi-final against Tipp, three weeks out from their opening championship match in Ennis. I may be reaching there but, if I was a manager in the current environment, that’s the way I’d be thinking. And what I’d want to avoid. Darragh Egan will want to test his Wexford players against Limerick but he may also have concluded that, after losing four of his most important players to injury during the Cork game last Sunday, that there is no need to have another cut and risk more injuries this weekend when there is nothing to be gained from going flat out.
The only guarantee this weekend is that Kilkenny will be going all out to beat Waterford and secure a semi-final spot. Waterford know full well what’s at stake too and, while Waterford always want to beat Kilkenny, hamstring injuries to Conor Prunty and Austin Gleeson will have also placed Davy Fitz on high alert. It’s a delicate balancing act between pushing the players hard but not hard enough to risk destabilising the squad further ahead of a date with the All-Ireland champions on April 23.
No disrespect to Westmeath but Kilkenny can really go all-out for a league title when they are facing the midlanders in their opening championship match at the end of April. With Derek Lyng having been schooled so heavily by Brian Cody, Lyng will surely see a clash with their neighbours as the ideal launchpad for going after that league title.
Brian Lohan, Pat Ryan, John Kiely, Liam Cahill, Micheal Donoghue, and Darren Gleeson will be using Sunday as another opportunity to test personnel and try out subtle tweaks to their gameplans, whereas Willie Maher and Joe Fortune will be looking to build up a head of steam ahead of the Laois-Westmeath relegation final on Saturday week. In so many ways, that is the most important game of the league, which can’t be right for our second most important competition. On last weekend, Dónal Óg Cusack wondered about Jarlath Burns’ commitment to hurling when he said that the Armagh man had barely mentioned the game in his initial soundings as incoming GAA President.
That may have been harsh from Dónal Óg when Jarlath isn’t even in the door but Cusack is right in lots of other ways. If Jarlath has been anyway tuned into this league, he should be sitting down with Larry McCarthy and having a discussion on what can be done to make the competition more attractive than what it currently is. I don’t think that it’s working at the moment. And most other hurling people don’t believe it is either.
