Two out of three enough for Tribe

Teatime Saturday... A thought strikes.

How many things will Galway have to get right tomorrow in order to win? Easy answer: too many — unlike Sinatra’s regrets — to mention.

They’re the underdogs, they’re playing the most successful hurling team of all time and not only will they be required to play really well if the MacCarthy Cup is to be theirs for the first time in 24 years, they could — like Tipperary in 2009 — play really well and lose. Still, three specifics spring to mind.

First, avoid driving more than seven or eight wides. Of the numerous prerequisites for a Galway victory, a high scores-to-shots ratio is the most essential.

Second, prompt action on the part of the management in identifying and rectifying problems in defence. Stand agape as one of the Kilkenny forwards, scenting blood, hammers away at his man and takes him for 1-3 and the day will almost certainly be lost.

Finally, be ahead entering the closing 10 minutes, or at any rate be within hailing distance. If Galway are leading they’ll be able to wheel out their favourite party trick, get bodies behind the barricade and keep Kilkenny out through sheer weight of numbers. If they’re within a point or two it’s conceivable that the crowd may carry them home, a la Cork in 1999.

There are many other boxes the challengers will have to tick, of course. But these are three to be recalled and parsed in 24 hours’ time.

Teatime Sunday... Two out of three, as the man sang, ain’t bad. Anthony Cunningham and his selectors didn’t end up needing to switch or replace any victim of waterboarding by the Kilkenny attack. Because, so stringently and vigilantly did Galway defend, there were no victims.

Quite the reverse, in fact.

It was the Kilkenny forward line who were the victims for the first half, eaten alive on their own puck-outs. Time and again David Herity plonked the ball down on top of his forwards. Time and again, as in the semi-final against Cork, it was a Galway stick that batted the sliotar away and a Galway hand that was first to the second ball.

The upshot was that it took the favourites 34 minutes to manage consecutive scores. That they were within five points of their opponents at the break was a small miracle. Galway had hurled better, defended better and done the crisper, more imaginative attacking.

Yet the last thing a champion loses is his instinct. Playing in doltish straight lines they may have been, but Kilkenny began to turn the screw early in the second half and kept turning it all the way to the finish.

Which brings us to another of those three prerequisites. Galway were neck and neck with their opponents entering the final furlong. They didn’t lose because they’d hurled so well in the first place that they put themselves in with a chance of winning. And their spirit, and the crowd, very nearly carried them home thereafter.

Granted, they hit 13 wides, eight of them in the second half, two of them awful misses by Iarla Tannian and Joe Canning at the death. On any other day such profligacy would have condemned them to loss of their deposit for failing to reach the quota. But on this day the bottom line remained: they still didn’t lose.

A great game? No. A great, elemental, thoroughly absorbing contest? Utterly.

That Galway are still standing is eminently right and fitting. They, after all, were the team who brought the summer to life when they demolished Kilkenny in the Leinster final. Suddenly everything was fresh, everything was different, everything was suffused with a new hope.

Bliss it was in that fleeting dawn to be alive, a dawn in which not only Galway, Cork and Tipperary could dream of September glory but Waterford, Limerick and Clare could harbour realistic hopes of an extended journey. Most of these counties will begin next season a place or two further up the grid.

At long last, this was the first of the levelling-off championships. There will be more of these interesting summers in the years to come (as an aside, a triangular tournament involving Cork, Waterford and Limerick would make for very interesting viewing indeed. Limerick are a team one can’t wait to see more of in 2013. What a shame, and what a drag on their prospects for progress, they won’t be in the top flight next spring).

On the negative side, Dublin were the year’s disappointment, Laois continue to go from bad to worse while Wexford and Offaly, in the words of a well known GAA fan from the latter county, are where they are — and are not going anywhere better in the foreseeable future.

Tipperary? August 19 was not the county’s finest day on any number of levels, and that is to be very kind about it. But Declan Ryan will always have his 0-4 from the 1988 All-Ireland final and Tommy Dunne will always have that glorious opening score — satiny and sinuous, off his left, from out on the Cusack Stand touchline — that showed a captain’s way to his younger colleagues in the 2001 renewal. Let us remember the pair of them for such afternoons instead.

Contrary to much of the tenor of the coverage following Kilkenny/Tipp, the sport is not out of control or anything close to it. That said, no valid case exists for referees not to brandish yellow cards for the common or garden handbags stuff of the early exchanges.

To airily dismiss them as “all part of the game” misses not only their intrinsic silliness but also the absolute absence of necessity for them. This is hurling at its highest level, not some junior B match where it’s incumbent that macho messages be transmitted from the throw-in. The sooner Congress makes helmet-tampering a red-card offence, moreover, the better.

Fortunately an inquest on the refereeing here will not grace tomorrow’s papers. Barry Kelly was on top of his brief from the off, sharp and decisive, firm without being fussy, determined to dispense yellow cards when appropriate without being pedantic or trigger-happy about it. That foul on Tommy Walsh in the preface to Canning’s levelling point at the end was an obvious oversight on his part. There weren’t many others.

A word about Henry Shefflin, who has never been more heroic.

Greatness is weighed and measured in many ways. Among those facets are durability and longevity, and this was Shefflin’s 61st consecutive championship appearance.

He has been ever present during the Cody era, through college and adulthood, through high days and low days, through marriage and babies and two cruciate injuries. And yesterday, through sheer force of character and will, he did more than anyone else to drag Kilkenny to within a nose of the winning post. Always showing, always shovelling, always making himself central and relevant.

A ninth All-Ireland medal: what about it? Shefflin’s greatness was enshrined long ago, and here he demonstrated it yet again.

Demonstrated it on a day when nobody lost, everybody won in some shape or form and Galway got most of the essentials right.