Eimear Ryan: Powder kept dry but Limerick still a joy

Even as every other county is busy plotting Limerick’s demise, they remain a joy to watch.

Wed, 01 Mar, 2023 - 22:18

John Kiely would make a great politician. Interviewed after Limerick’s not quite comfortable, but still inevitable win over Galway last Sunday, he was poker-faced and even-handed as he was questioned about the Kyle Hayes incident. I’ll have to watch it back later, he said (I’m paraphrasing), but Kyle may have only been signalling the sideline Limerick’s way. Later, he added that there may have been a ‘context’ to Hayes’s strike to Brian Concannon’s faceguard, a perfect hurling euphemism in the vein of ‘the money was only resting in my account’. As for Aaron Gillane? That would be an ecumenical – sorry, an internal matter.

It was good TV. The TG4 post-match interviews are a little bit spicier than the cosy RTÉ ones, and Kiely, to his credit, didn’t get rattled or shirty. This is all part and parcel of being the most successful manager in modern hurling, being the leader of the team that every other county has in their crosshairs. You back your lads to the hilt, even when it strains credibility. Maybe especially then.

While it may be John Kiely’s job to give Hayes the benefit of the doubt, it’s certainly not the ref’s. It’s possible, even probable, that neither Sean Stack nor his linesman saw what the TV viewers and much of the crowd did, but Stack’s chat with Hayes – including a reassuring pat on the chest – certainly made it seem as if Hayes was getting special dispensation. Subsequently, much of the Twitter discourse was about Hayes being ‘lucky’ to still be on the pitch, but I wondered – is he really? Are refs actually doing lads favours when they let them off the hook like that, or in a way are they hanging them out to dry?

Now Hayes has a CCCC hearing and a potential retrospective ban looming over him. If he had just taken his punishment, gotten his second yellow and been sent off, I’m not sure anyone would still be talking about it. No one is as exercised about Tom Monaghan hitting Cian Lynch in the faceguard, because it was dealt with then and there and Monaghan was booked for it. It’s the injustice that provokes people’s outrage as much as the incident itself.

But back to the match. Sunday’s marquee game – in fact, the only televised hurling match last weekend – gave us our first glimpse of summer hurling: blue skies, bright saturated colours, the stand in Salthill casting a shadow. It was a strange sort of game, however – occasionally sleepy, devoid of real tension, constantly threatening to explode into life but never quite doing so. This is not to say that it wasn’t a rewarding watch. It was lovely to see Cian Lynch back, his magic point in the 40th minute being a real highlight. For a young player, Shane O’Brien asserted himself confidently and showed great ball-winning abilities. Dan Morrissey stepped into Declan Hannon’s boots with seemingly effortless panache. Cianan Fahy beautifully intercepted one of Kyle Hayes’s short passes in the first half for a notable point, and was generally busy at midfield and a handful for Limerick.

But it was the Tom Morrissey show, really: that comically mangled yellow Cooper helmet, that cavalier half-ponytail, taking points at his ease from every angle. Just three scores out of his eight-point haul were from frees, and his free in the 57th minute – in which he played a one-two back the field and calmly swung the returning pass over the bar – seemed to sum up the assurance and improvisation with which he’s currently playing. Even as every other county is busy plotting Limerick’s demise, they remain a joy to watch.

In the end, Galway snuck up on the visitors, surprising us all; somehow there was only two points between the teams with three minutes of normal time left. But even with Galway’s comeback, still the game refused a sense of urgency. Since they hadn’t led at any stage, it didn’t seem narratively plausible that Galway might win. Sure enough, Limerick shifted gears, won some crucial frees, closed it out. That man Tom Morrissey popped up again for an insurance point.

A goal might have ignited things for Galway. Conor Cooney did everything right for his goal chance in the first half, bar keeping his shot under crossbar height, but aside from that there wasn’t a hint of a goal in the game. In stark contrast to Clare’s gleeful goal blitz against Wexford on the same afternoon, Limerick didn’t seem particularly fussed about raising green flags. One gets the sense that they may even be evolving away from a reliance on goals. Of course, in championship, when you have Gearóid Hegarty and Kyle Hayes carving up and down your flanks, goals are going to happen; but Limerick may well view these as happy bonuses rather than the building blocks of victory. The received wisdom that goals win matches? Tired. Developing strikers so proficient that they can score from anywhere, and manipulate possession so that they can shoot in splendid isolation? Wired.

At some stage, one of the many teams looking to topple the champions will grant Joe Canning’s wish and push up on Limerick’s formidable half-back line, disrupting their inch-perfect delivery, but – perhaps understandably – everyone seems to be keeping their top-secret Limerick Strategy under wraps until championship. Henry Shefflin won’t be displeased; that Galway got themselves within two points of Limerick without ever doing anything extraordinary points to a certain resilience, a sense of doing the simple things right. As a Tipperary fan, I’m happy enough that Tipp are in Division 1’s other, more low-key group; not over-analysing anything, not tying themselves up in knots about how to take on the All-Ireland champions. God knows there’ll be plenty of time for that in the cauldron of the Munster round-robin. Seven weeks to go and counting.