Good to be back, but where’s the razzmatazz?

AFTER so many months of doom and gloom, of recession and depression, it is great to see the real hurling season starting again with the Allianz Hurling League this weekend.

Whetting my appetite was a game I saw last Sunday, a Harty Cup semi-final between Árd Scoil Rís and St Flannan’s. There were 43 scores in a brilliant game, without a dirty stroke, and great credit due to the two schools for that, to the players and management especially. Fair play to Árd Scoil Rís too for digging out the win, and on this evidence you’d have to say the future is bright for both Clare and Limerick.

That’s a positive from last week, but there is also a negative, also at schools level. Tipperary played Galway in the All-Ireland Vocational Schools semi-final which the Premier boys won 2-17 to 1-14. But lo and behold the result was challenged as Tipperary had underage players in their team! In my time we had a real problem, fellas playing overage, and the late, great Jimmy ‘Butler’ Coffey famously won an All-Ireland minor championship with Tipperary when he was 20, and — according to himself — ‘I wasn’t the oldest fella on the field either!’