Scrap the ugly tactics and let the game flow
They’re going into the greatest stadium in the world to play the greatest game in the world. I hope they realise that, I hope they appreciate that, and play hurling as it was meant to be played, with freedom, with enjoyment.
I know guys are fitter now, faster, have spent all those months in the gym building themselves up. I’d prefer to see them use all that physical training in a positive way, when it comes to playing the game. I don’t like the way hurling has been edging towards the ugly way football has been played over the last few years. I know you have to have tactics in any game but hurling is still as it always was, has some very basic principles – those shouldn’t change.
One of the basic principles is that forwards are there to score and if they’re doing that they’re doing their job. Forwards are not there to play as extra defenders — that’s why you have backs. If those backs are not up to doing their own job, get in someone who can. Midfielders are there to link the play, they can be the extra back or the extra forward, depending on how the game is going for their team.
To illustrate that I’m going to focus on one player – Lar Corbett. Here’s a man who scored three goals in an All-Ireland final two years ago, four goals in a Munster final last year, yet there he was in this year’s Munster final way out the field, roaming everywhere.
He hit a lot of ball, I’ll grant you that, but what did Lar score? Nothing, not a point, not a goal. One of the best finishers in the game taken out of it by his own team or maybe even by himself. The place Lar should be is close to goal. He can do all the roaming he likes out the field and people might say he’s setting up scores. That’s not Lar’s job, that’s not the best use of his talent. He’s a proven finisher, play him close to goals and let him stay around there.
To the game. I’ve seen both of these teams several times this year and neither has really impressed me, not in the way they did over the last few years. Tipperary are unbeaten in the championship, Kilkenny won the league, but both have suffered defeats in big games – that’s not how it was for the last three years.
Kilkenny played two halves against Dublin – maybe they put too much into that game, maybe they over-rated Dublin (certainly everyone else did!). Since then though Kilkenny have played only one half of every championship game. The second half against Galway and the second half against Limerick. That’s most unlike Kilkenny.
I can understand the performance against Galway. They were missing the two midfielders, Michael Fennelly and Michael Rice, the engine of the team and JJ Delaney, one of the finest defenders to ever play the game when all the damage was suffered in the first half-hour.
They had no such excuse against Limerick, and again they were lacking any fluency in the first half. If it hadn’t been for Henry’s two goals – two vital goals – they might even have lost that game. Of course they were missing another great player that day, centre-back Brian Hogan.
Unusually for Kilkenny and for Brian Cody this year, they locked the doors of Nowlan Park after the Leinster final. Is that a negative or a positive? Are Kilkenny — the team that never gave a damn whether people saw what they were doing or not — now overly concerned with themselves? Are we going to see yet another new side to Kilkenny hurling this Sunday?
Intriguing on its own.
To Tipperary: biggest question of all for them, will Conor O’Mahony and Paul Curran, the two central defenders, show again the form from earlier in the year against Limerick and Cork? Conor was definitely in trouble against Waterford on Seamus Prendergast – he had better be right tomorrow.
Another two players who are going to have to be on top of their game, midfielders Brendan Maher and Shane McGrath. Up front, Noel McGrath will need to inspire.
It’s not an All-Ireland final but this could be the biggest battle of the last four years between these teams, and in that context, I think Kilkenny will just about shade it.
