Tipp’s first task is to protect their net
The speaker was an English defender of the 1950s, the subject of his lamentation the great Stanley Matthews, the Wizard of the Wing himself. It’s a timely quote in the wake of the recent demise of Matthews’ great contemporary Tom Finney, the Preston Plumber.
(The Wizard of the Wing, the Preston Plumber, the Lion of Vienna. Hmm. What happened to Aeroplane O’Shea, Sweeper Ryan and all the other great GAA nicknames of yesteryear?)
It is timely because Finney was by all accounts a more complete player than Sir Stanley. More accomplished, more varied, blessed with a range of tricks and capable of causing trouble in any of the forward positions with equal facility. But there it was: if Matthews had only the one trick he did it so consummately well and so laughably frequently that the narrowness of his repertoire made no difference.
“You know what Clare are going to do. You just can’t stop them doing it.”
The speaker is a member of a backroom team whose charges recently took on the All-Ireland champions.
His and their identities are irrelevant; one imagines Eamon O’Shea uttering exactly the same sentiments. Well, the first part of the sentiments anyway.
O’Shea knows what Clare are going to do tomorrow. He was there on the sideline at Semple Stadium last month. A Conor McGrath hat-trick and a seven-point victory for the visitors. He’d better have some kind of a plan to prevent a repeat.
The first objective for Tipperary will be the first objective for every team that meet the Banner in the championship: protect the king at all costs. If Clare end up beating you with points, fair enough — but at least make them beat you with points by ensuring they don’t beat you with goals.
The hosts shipped four goals against them last month. It might well have been six. Ship no more than two goals tomorrow and they’ll have a platform on which to build.
They’re not naming their 15 until lunchtime today, which for our purposes is a pity. But expect Tipp to park their half-back line as near to their full-back line as possible in order to compress space; expect to see a pair of wing-backs with the pace to go with the Clare wing-forwards when they make their support runs from deep; and expect that O’Shea will have instructed his goalkeeper to defend off his small square rather than off his goal-line, perhaps after going the whole hog and watching a few clips of Hugo Lloris doing his sweeper-keeper stuff.
For all his undoubted brilliance last summer, Anthony Nash was much too tight to his line for Shane O’Donnell’s hat-trick on September 28, too slow to come out and face O’Donnell down. The next keeper confronted with a Clare inside forward lurking in space in front of him must anticipate the handpass, get out quickly, make himself bigger and force the man in saffron and blue into hurrying his decision and hastening his shot.
The employment by Clare’s opponents of a seventh defender has been suggested by Donal O’Grady and John Mullane. It’ll be no surprise to see Tipp go for it, particularly in view of Brendan Maher’s success as the spare man in the second half against Cork three weeks ago. Whether Maher is placed almost on top of the full-forward, as Pat Donnellan was vis a vis Joe Canning in last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final, or operates 10 yards further up the field as a sweeper, he has the brains and the hurling for the job.
By way of illustration, Liam Sheedy could have put Maher on the half-back line, at midfield or even on the half-forward line for the 2006 All-Ireland minor final. Instead he gave him the No 4 jersey in order to have him in Canning’s precinct and on hand to do such mopping up as might be required.
It’s too early to speculate that Tipperary — the Arsenal parallels have never been far away in recent years — turned a psychological corner when escaping relegation against Dublin. Against Cork they were an altogether different proposition from the headless walking corpse of the Clare game. There was one very obvious reason for that; Tipp/Cork was immensely enjoyable because it was immensely loose, the highest scoring league meeting of the counties since the first fixture in the spring of 1928.
Yet credit where it was due. Tipp deserved to beat Cork because they made not one but two winning bursts, one in each half. (Note to Seamus Callanan if he’s reading: it is never a crime to settle for a point from a close-range free when one is 10 points up halfway through the first half.) Nor should it be forgotten that for all their failings the same afternoon they did hit 15 wides against Clare last month.
The latter have used the league wisely, even if they may be surprised at getting this far. A repeat of the dive the county took in the 1998 league semi-final, however, is unlikely tomorrow. For all that Davy will be keeping something under the bonnet for summer, Clare do not have a Munster semi-final against this team to fret about.
That said, a league final against Kilkenny is not the most desirable of prospects — not because they mightn’t win it but because they don’t want to be meeting Kilkenny too often.
How to stop Clare? Of all the questions that hover over championship 2014, this is the most pressing. Tomorrow Tipperary attempt a first early solution. After all, it’s not as if they don’t know what Clare are going to do.
