Enda McEvoy: The only team who can afford to run a non-trier is Limerick

SUBTANTIAL LEAP? Adam English of Limerick celebrates after scoring his side's first goal during the oneills.com Munster GAA Hurling U20 final against Tipperary. Is this his year for the seniors? Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

Beyond fanciful, obviously, but ponder a world in which sports competitions could sue. Imagine the fun, the games, the legal shenanigans.

The All-Ireland club football championship, for instance, that blameless and law-abiding entity, issuing proceedings against the GAA for flagrant reputational damage. Hurt and distress, embarrassment, its good name of more than half a century’s standing brought into public disrepute.

No case for the defence here. Open and shut. Slam and dunk. Victory for the plaintiff with exemplary damages thrown in for good measure.

Or consider the National Hurling League versus the people who’ve been traducing it since Waterford went down like a lead zeppelin last May.

Now whether the NHL possesses a bulletproof reputation in the eyes of right-thinking members of hurling society is admittedly another matter. It’s always been the league, the redheaded stepbrother, with its myriad faults and failings and sins of omission.

Division 1 is, depending on the format in any given season, either too big or too small. It’s too competitive or not competitive enough. It should or shouldn’t have quarter-finals and/or semi-finals. It starts too early or too late.

Goldilocks watched it religiously every year and not once did she deem it to be just right.

And now the latest insult. The 2022 winners crashed and burned when the heavy stuff started, so the word to the wise is to make a leper of the business end of the 2023 iteration and give it the widest berth possible. Unclean, unclean!

When you win the thing you will be first against the wall come the championship. It’s inevitable. It’s unavoidable.

It’s nonsense.

The only team who can afford to run a non-trier over the coming months are the ones wearing green. The pack are in no position to have notions. Flouncing around faking punches in February and March will not constitute due preparation for the task of landing a glove on Limerick in April, May and thereafter.

In any case, as Henry Shefflin has pointed out, there’s an extra week between the league decider and the opening round of the provincial championships compared to last year. What’s more, too many people appear to have conveniently forgotten that two teams contested the 2022 decider and that one of them did not crash and burn in the summer.

With a fortnight between the semi-finals and the final, and another fortnight between the final and the opening round of the provincial championships, the sequencing replicates that of the closing stages of the All-Ireland series (quarter-finals June 24, semi-finals July 8/9, final July 23). All very sensible.

So why the noses in the air? This is 2023, not 1983, with recovery regimes at Nasa levels of sophistication and players so comprehensively hydrated they could pass for stretches of the Mississippi.

Play the ball in front of you. Try and reach the final. Get there and then decide whether or not to omit a training session the week beforehand, thus to have the lads slightly undercooked for the big day should it be deemed appropriate.

We’ve made the following comment here at this time of year, each year, for the past aeon, but once more with ennui: what would be so terrible about Cork winning a first National League title since 1998? Can’t start a fire without a spark, as the man said.

As for Pat Ryan, so too for Derek Lyng, albeit maybe less so for Liam Cahill in view of his Waterford experience last year, targeting silverware in one’s first season in the job and ensuring one’s long-term oil reserves are not depleted does not constitute mutually contradictory objectives.

In the long run, however, Cork’s season will stand or fall on how well or otherwise they intellectualise their defending.

They need to defend better and have needed to do so for a long time. They need to get players around and over the ball in packs. They need to fill gaps. They do not need midfielders standing gawping in midfield while Aaron Gillane is bearing down on them in the last 30 metres of the field.

The Joe Canning Laochra Gael episode last week showed that awful (from a Leeside standpoint) goal by Jonathan Glynn in the 2015 All-Ireland quarter-final in its full gruesome glory. A papier mache rearguard and Glynn trundling through it to find the net after 48 seconds.

Cork have spent the past seven years conceding the same goal. Here’s where it has to stop.

Naturally, the return of Davy to Waterford will add greatly to the gaiety of the nation. He’ll be mad for road (being Davy) and he’ll have filled a larder with cunning new tactical wheezes (being Davy). One report of last month’s meeting with Tipperary breathlessly revealed that five of the Waterford forwards hung around inside the opposition's 20-metre line for the opening three minutes before fanning out and breaking into the Mexican hat dance or the Siege of Ennis or suchlike. Phew.

Yet Davy may be just what the Deise need at just the time they need it. A two-year term of office is perfect, moreover. If Waterford don’t achieve anything under him in that period they wouldn’t have been achieving it in a putative Year 3 or 4. Keep an eye out for how much game time Pat Fitzgerald gets.

Some other observations. You knew on the night Tipperary fell to Kerry 13 months ago that 2022 would be even more traumatic for them than was commonly anticipated. The issue from here isn’t the direction (see Yazz) but the rate of progress.

On Saturday, Kilkenny return to Corrigan Park, scene of the greatest humiliation in their history, 80 years later. They may not lose this one.

Clare, where Brian Lohan needs to source a new defender or two. One wonders about the depth of the scars from last summer. One wonders too if the scars of the Munster final they nearly won may not prove more lasting than the scars of the All-Ireland semi-final they failed to show up for. Perhaps this is a bit too existential a subject for early February.

Galway, where the manager has his feet fully under the table now and is aware of who he can and cannot trust. He’s admitted he has “to find new players and open up the panel”. He’s equally conscious that a new manager can get a bounce the first year. “It’s the second year that’s the test.” 

Shefflin won as much as he did not by being the reincarnation of Jim Langton but rather through sheer force of will. Time and again he refused to take defeat as a given or 'no' as an answer. It will be up to the Galway players to live up to his Himalayan standards. Horses to water and all of that.

And Limerick, whose centre of gravity will tilt again with the return of Cian Lynch. Asserting that he has reinvented the position of centre-forward is overdoing it. Asserting that he has given it a fascinating new dimension is not.

Traditionally the role demanded tunnel vision, as personified by his fellow countyman from Ahane, the most famous number 11 of them all. Lynch in contrast hurls with his eyes on the rear-view mirror. If his game is not for replication on the simple basis that the Patrickswell man is sui generis, that’s fine too. We’ll always need the Bonner Mahers.

Looking a little further down the road, the unexciting and unavoidable conclusion is Limerick once more, with once more the greatest danger posed by Galway, possibly in a final this time.

The MacCarthy Cup holders know the fences. They’re tuned to the rhythm of the seasons, as Cairbre Ó Cairealláin, their S&C guy, observed recently, recalling that on the eve of last year’s championship there was “almost a subconscious thing in the squad” that the real business started now.

This may be the summer Cathal O’Neill and or/Adam English make a substantial leap. And John Kiely has even diversified into turning out All-Ireland-winning young scientists. Well, why not?

But someone will win the league too and that may produce ramifications in 2024. To repeat: play the ball in front of you.