Enda McEvoy: The maths insist Cork challenge doesn't yet add up

John Kiely is not just beating his opponents but beating the game itself.

Sat, 06 Jul, 2024 - 08:03

Jarring words for readers who assumed they’d left the subject behind in the dim and increasingly distant past otherwise known as Leaving Cert. Let’s do some maths.

Relax, it’s straightforward. Tomorrow’s outcome will be decided not by what Limerick hit but by what Cork hit. What will that be?

Take it as read – no reason not to - that the champions reach their mystical 30-point mark. How close, then, do Cork get to 0-31 or 1-28 or whatever?

Not without managing three goals, preferably four. Three more than their opponents do, at any rate. Clare created a trifecta of fine chances in the Munster final, which offers encouragement. Against that, Limerick will not blanch at double-teaming Alan Connolly or fouling him for the concession of harmless frees, serial champions always knowing how far to push the envelope without ripping it. And Nickie Quaid, having looked occasionally fallible last season, is enjoying a golden career autumn.

Cork do possess the one ingredient that might undo Limerick, of course. Raw, unadulterated pace. Not because the champions are slow but because no team, not even serial champions, enjoy opponents running at them.

Logic says Connolly, incidentally scoreless in his two most recent outings, will find more room when the game becomes stretched, a remark that may equally apply to Shane Kingston. One of the myriad problems in facing Limerick, however, is that they refuse to allow games become stretched. Besides, clearing the space to channel sufficient clean ball into Connolly that leaves him one on one with the nearest defender will entail the challengers’ half-back line winning their individual battles first. Dirty ball, and infrequent dirty ball at that, will be the only outcome if they spend the afternoon being turned.

There is also the small matter of precisely how good Cork are. The evidence pegs them as no more than middling.

Narrow defeats to Waterford and Clare. Victors against Limerick, the caveat glaring, while legally speaking the win against Tipperary would have already been stricken from the record for the purposes of maintaining the validity of the formbook. That they allowed themselves to be dragged down a fortnight ago by Dublin’s shortcomings shouldn’t matter except that it deprives them of momentum.

Micheál Donoghue’s men weren’t going to win without controlling the controllables, which is a fancy way of saying that at the most basic level they needed to convert their frees. In the event they couldn’t manage even that. Each new wide rendered the air in the room staler. The upshot was yet another of those dismal All Ireland quarter-finals where the limitations of the underdogs set the course on the satnav and where by way of response, or non-response, the overdogs can’t be bothered to override it.

Imagine if Dublin hadn’t hit 16 wides. Imagine if Dublin had incisive forwards. You may say I’m a dreamer.

Cork played with the handbrake on because they were allowed to, an approach compounded by what we now know was a bout of illness. Gauging Pat Ryan’s mindset does not require a degree in advanced thinking. We’re going to beat these guys as long as we don’t do anything silly and no matter if we don’t get goals. Let’s keep the powder dry for Limerick. Let’s not give them a preview of the moves we’ve been auditioning in training.

Chances of a goalless affair? Not as outlandish as it may sound, in which case the result will not be in issue. Limerick, as even the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri are by now aware, remain gloriously unfixated on busting the net, points continuing as their bread of heaven. In the process they’ve put a new gloss on an old saw. Take your points - and if the goals don’t come, well, keep taking your points.

When the sides met at Páirc Uí Chaoimh on May 11 the first two Cork goals arrived from the inability of the opposition half-back line to address the dropping ball, the first two Limerick goals from pressing high and turning over the opposition full-back line in possession. Limerick rectifying their failure is a more likely scenario than Cork rectifying theirs.

Race memory matters more in hurling than in most sports. Cork have been in this position, or near enough, before and have forged famous victories therefrom: 1966, 1990, 1999. But all of those opponents were fallible, even if this only emerged after the fact; Kilkenny ’66 were overtrained, Tipperary ’90 complacent and Kilkenny ’99 not any better than Cork on a line through Clare plus a diligent reading of the formbook.

If the current MacCarthy Cup holders turn out to be fallible after the fact they’ve done a mighty job of hiding it. Unlike with Achilles, similarly the most daunting opponent of his era, Limerick’s body armour is an all-over garment.

And a remark we made about Cody’s Kilkenny a million years ago and didn’t remotely envisage ever having to make again: John Kiely is not just beating his opponents but beating the game itself.

Champions should not be too predictable. Instead of playing themselves into the game and keeping their long-distance batteries booming, perhaps Limerick will go all out to put this one to bed quickly. Get stuck into that full-back line again, bag two goals in the opening ten minutes and coast home from there.

Twenty five years have passed since the last time a vibrant young team in red announced itself in Croke Park, a lacuna almost as disconcerting for the sport of hurling as deflating for Leesiders. History to repeat itself tomorrow?

No. Cork have too much to get right and Limerick throw a heavier broadside. The maths insists.

Derek McGrath: Kilkenny are better but Clare will win because they have to

So Clare got back on the horse a fortnight ago. Good for them. It wasn’t a given. But that was the easy bit.

Victory today demands no leap. They were an Eoin Murphy minor miracle away from taking Kilkenny to extra time 12 months ago and this season they’ve beaten them twice. Granted, TJ Reid was absent for the league final but Brian Lohan’s men still had to win it and they did. That was all that mattered.

It’s official. Clare are capable of doing the business in must-win matches, just not must-win matches against Limerick. Capturing league silverware did not impinge on their championship prospects and in any case there can never be something wrong with going from four NHL titles to five NHL titles. An rud is annamh deserves to be acknowledged and savoured.

They’ve also advanced when it comes to processing defeats by the neighbours. Whereas two years ago the events of the provincial showpiece ended up draining their life force, last month’s disappointment was merely another callus on their hide as opposed to being the end of the world. Thus they fetch up here in reasonable fettle, conscious of the importance of the type of good start that was beyond them on their last two appearances at this stage of the competition.

Tony Kelly’s legacy obliges him to make an All-Ireland semi-final of the 2020s his own. Shane O’Donnell has been central to everything good about Clare this summer. It is time for Kelly to follow suit.

This is not some blithe eye-test declamation. The stats say as much. Over the course of the past two semi-finals O’Donnell has hit 1-1 and 0-4, David Fitzgerald 0-3 twice, Kelly 0-1 and 0-0. Compare the latter with Eoin Cody’s 0-3 and 1-5. Or don’t. Even operating on the margins from distance the Ballyea man is well capable of sniping three or four points from play. It won’t be game-breaking but it will help.

There’s been something a little sharper, a little more coherent, about Kilkenny since their plucky draw away to Carlow, as by rights there ought to have been. In the Leinster final they had the bright idea of getting Adrian Mullen on the ball as much as possible. Dublin were awful that evening. Kilkenny were pretty good regardless.

A word or three about Nowlan Park seven days ago. Clearly the evening belonged to Tipperary. It may prove in time to be the night the world began for a number of their players, although it’s no harm to remember that these are not even 18-year-olds but 17-year-olds. It will unquestionably prove to be the night James Woodlock submitted the first draft of a successful application to be the county’s senior manager before the end of the decade.

Here was epic, once in several blue moons, twice in the space of a century stuff. You reckoned this was a rotten season for Tipp? Tipp folk themselves reckoned it was a rotten season? Wrong tense. Go pluperfect instead. It had been a rotten season. Now it's a glorious season, magically transformed on foot of a night they’ll be singing about in 100 years’ time.

The occasion doubled as an emblem of Kilkenny’s decline as a thinking hurling county. Since Joey Holden lifted the MacCarthy Cup in 2015 they’ve made 10 appearances in All-Ireland finals across the three grades – and won one. (By a point in the 2022 u20 decider against a Limerick team minus the ineligible Cathal O’Neill, whose absence looked a loss then and a far bigger loss now.) On the law of averages it should be borderline impossible.

The record bespeaks a staggering systems failure. In doing so it raises questions for other counties, the leading ones even more than the less successful ones.

Does a given county possess a coaching culture? If not, is it interested in creating one? Does a recognition of the importance of evolution exist, an acknowledgement that what works now will be obsolete in three years’ time? Never doubt the speed with which institutional memory can be lost almost overnight or the manner in which the type of old-fashioned low cunning and know-how that wins big matches and that’s handed down from one generation to the next can be squandered. Ask Meath or Offaly.

An alternative formulation of that much invoked nostrum, eternal vigilance, is success in ensuring that the grown-ups are in the grown-up jobs. It will be intriguing to see, when the current once in a lifetime crop vacate the stage, whether Limerick have cultivated a coaching culture that guarantees they’ll remain there or thereabouts, for good measure winning an All-Ireland against the head, whatever the grade, every now and then. It will come a surprise if they haven’t.

Shedding the timorousness that hobbled them in the last two semi-finals, a timorousness that would be anathema to them in Munster, is mandatory for Clare today. Everything about them indicates greater readiness and greater worldliness. But Kilkenny probably have their number.