New Model welcome, but old order will be restored
A lot of winter talk that lasted even into part of the summer was taken up with how would Kilkenny deal with Clare’s style of play in a likely meeting in Croke Park; that intriguing championship matchup will now have to wait another year, if it ever comes at all in the guise we’d yearned.
In the late 1990s Clare and Wexford brought such colour and personality to the old game that they lit up that era but it is a regret that for one day only they didn’t simultaneously get to light up Croke Park.
What we missed out on then, the hurling gods made it up with what they and the two counties offered up this past fortnight, even if it was at the cost of postponing, maybe even cancelling, Kilkenny-Clare.
You could say Clare were unlucky this year — and certainly Davy has — but then you’d need to acknowledge that they got a bit lucky last year. We’ve said it before: if a ball had bounced differently in the bowl in an RTÉ studio and they had been drawn to play Kilkenny in Nowlan Park in the first round of the qualifiers last year, then it would have been Clare and not Tipperary whose summer would have ended in the first week of July. The difference between first and eighth was that marginal. Instead Clare got a home draw against a weaker side and then a clash against a Wexford side too raw to win.
This year Clare didn’t get the breaks. This year Wexford were ready to win. And they could sense it. In Damian Lawlor’s new book, Fields of Fire: The Inside Story of Hurling’s Renaissance, the chapter on Wexford hurling concludes with a quote from Liam Dunne. “The sooner we play better teams the better we will be. We weren’t ready for the big boys but we are now.”
There are few backrooms with the kind of experience and wisdom that Wexford have.
Liam Griffin, their forwards coach, is now 68 but his mind is still as open and as sharp as it was in the Braveheart years.
Their strength and conditioning coach, Gerry Fitzpatrick, not only filled that spot with the Waterford hurlers of the last decade but is one of the best basketball coaches this country has known. He’s coached the likes of Waterford Wildcats and Neptune to national titles, coached both the senior men’s and women’s national team, including Jay Larranaga, now an assistant coach to the Boston Celtics.
Think of all the sessions Fitzpatrick has taken in such a technical and tactical sport. Think of all the timeouts and team talks he’s given through the years. When you do it’s easy to picture a hungry and humble young coach like Dunne sitting down with two such master coaches and them chatting away, moving salt and pepper shakers across a table and helping inform Dunne to give the kind of talk he would have given in the huddle at the end of normal time last Saturday that persuaded his players that they hadn’t blown their chance.
Last Saturday has helped validate Dunne’s approach to modernising Wexford, and indeed Lawlor’s thesis that Kilkenny have forced the weak to become strong. Yet, while in many ways this year’s championship is carrying on where last year’s left off, 2013 is increasingly looking like the outlier we suspected at the time it was.
You’ll hardly again have two teams in the final featuring only one starting player that had won any kind of silverware at senior level before.
And for all the parallels that the past 15 months has generated with the revolution years of the 1990s, it is very likely that it will be any two members of the old Big Three that will contest this year’s final.
Looking at how the brackets are panning out, it is virtually impossible not to see Kilkenny making the final and them not playing either Cork or Tipp.
Tipp would have felt last year if they had got into Croke Park they probably would have won it all. Now they’re only one game from that stage.
Cork aren’t just better than last year — they are better for last year. Brian Gavin’s decision to allow one more play last September might have cost them an All-Ireland but the replay and further exposure to competing on such a stage accelerated their maturity. In that extra one game they gained an extra year’s experience.
Yet the more this year goes on the more last year looks like it was a mere gap year for Kilkenny. A bit like the young fella heading off to Australia for a break. As if Brian Cody was watching his TV over the winter and like Elvis in the old KitKat ad said to himself, ‘No, I ain’t dead, baby, I was just taking a break.’ Only without the chuckle.
We can see him being the cat with the last laugh in September. But before then the likes of Wexford giving us further reason to smile.
