Enda McEvoy: Spoiler alert - we already know how this show ends
SILVERWARE BAGGED: Limerick's Cian Lynch and Sean Finn celebrate after the league final. Pic: INPHO/Evan Treacy
In season three of a popular TV show about the tribulations of middle management as seen through the eyes of a harassed New Jersey businessman, the main protagonist acquires a new mistress. She is beautiful, smart and sophisticated. She also, it slowly emerges, has acute psychological and emotional issues.
Soon she is ringing the businessman’s wife and threatening to expose their relationship, upon which he despatches one of his myriad myrmidons to warn her off. The goon produces a gun and informs her that if she doesn’t lay off, his is the last face she’ll ever see. “It won’t be cinematic,” he leers.
All of which is a roundabout way of setting up the question that’s been convulsing the hurling world. Who’s going to win the 2024 All-Ireland..?
Getting into the minutiae of who’ll win the one before that reeks of . Fruitless work. Easier instead to call up last month’s Champion Hurdle on YouTube.
Limerick as Constitution Hill. The others as the others, nine lengths and more behind — and much more than nine lengths between first and second had Constitution Hill been pushed out. Just as Limerick would have won the league final by much more than 11 points — by anything up to 20 points — had they been pushed to or been pushed out.
And Constitution Hill is no trite touchstone. Ten years ago we were convinced, with ample justification, that we’d witnessed the greatest team of our lifetime. Four in a row, six in seven years. A once in half a century team.
As the intercounty arms race was increasing at the time in terms of fitness, preparation, tactical sophistication, expenditure, the works, so too the challenge of running up a sequence was only going to increase. Surely.
That another team is already going for four in a row, and five in six years, is astonishing. Nothing short of. The only thing more astonishing than that is the identity of the team in question. What an elaborate joke by the gods, with the fabled capriciousness of the immortals, to hoard their largesse for 45 years in order to give Limerick folk their birthday presents all at once.
To see how far the MacCarthy Cup holders have come it’s worth revisiting John Kiely’s comments following the 2017 National League semi-final defeat to Galway. The scoreline was 1-21 to 1-11.
Yes, Limerick hit 1-11. Really. They weren’t half the team they are now. Correction, they weren’t a third of the team they are now.
Galway were en route to a league/championship double. Kiely made them sound like the hurling equivalent of the vengeance-seeking Liam Neeson in one of those films that are never not on the telly.
"They are a really tough side to play against. They will chase you down, they will hold you up, they will turn you around, they will dispossess you. They will turn you over so many times and I guarantee our turnover rate is high. They have so many players on the field who are able to cover the ground and are physically strong. They are further down the road than we are.”
Sound familiar, apart from the last sentence?
But forget for a moment the physicality, the work ethic, the perpetual motion, the skill, the lot. Limerick’s greatest strength is the brilliance with which they intellectualise the game.
Their centre of gravity constituting a moveable feast, they present a constantly moving target and are thus impervious to drive-by shooters, random assassins and hit squads. Kyle Hayes to wing-back; Cian Lynch to centre-forward; Hayes returning to number 11 in Lynch’s absence; Barry Nash recast as the first corner-back with a roving commission in the history of the sport and their (gulp) fourth defender capable of scoring from distance.
Peak-Cody Kilkenny were a T-Rex. Huge and fearsome and carnivorous and voracious, but you could see them coming a mile off and therefore had the time to identify suitable asymmetric methods of engagement. As Tipp did when, having taken on the beast on its own terms in 2009, they changed the rules of the game the following year. Get it on.
The Limerick of Kiely and Kinnerk are not out of prehistory but out of mythology. They are hydra-headed.
So to what caveats about them as can be mustered.
Ernest Hemingway’s observation about how people go bust two ways — gradually, then suddenly — may or may not be apposite. One can visualise mental fatigue setting in with Limerick sooner or later, but that would be a gradual process and even then they have so much in hand over all comers for leeway.
A slight question mark does surround their third outing in Munster. The drill will be simple. Get four points on the board against Waterford and Clare before signing off with a win in the closing round against Cork. They’re bound to be slightly undercooked — the term is relative — for the trip to Tipp.
A failure to reach the final would upset the Swiss precision of their training preparations, with potential ramifications down the line. Yet two setbacks in the round robin would be required to prevent them reaching the provincial decider. It’s hardly going to happen.
Obviously they’ll be at their most vulnerable — again the term is relative — in an All-Ireland semi-final. Does the fact that Galway have come so consistently close to beating them at that stage of the competition make it more unlikely, or less unlikely, they might do so now? Lord knows.
Yet here’s one stat worth pondering. Fourteen of the 15 who started against Kilkenny last July had appeared against Galway in the final four years earlier.
On the face of it that’s too much. But it didn’t matter nine months ago and if Colin Coughlan and Cathal O’Neill maintain their recent form the panel will fizz with sufficient flux, creative tension and competition for places to render it a non-issue now.
The champions will only be beaten with goals, as Liam Cahill and Pat Ryan have noted. Who’ll have the balls to go for it? And how?
They won’t be opened up via ground hurling because nobody plays ground hurling any more. They might be opened up, as Joe Canning has mentioned, via long balls to a three-man full-forward line who hold their positions.
It would be gratifying, if only for old times’ sake, if the trio included a big lad on the edge of the square. A chap brainwashed into keeping Barry Nash pinioned in his corner would also be essential.
Nonetheless Limerick will not be unhorsed by opponents incapable of clean, stringent striking. In an age when outfield players have the liberty to light up a cigar while ambling around and shovelling out five-metre handpasses, how many contemporary half-backs and midfielders possess the wristwork and wandwork to fashion the room to swing under enemy pressure and deliver a ball that’s simultaneously whippy, lengthy and precise?
Waterford may well keep them at arm’s length on Sunday and lose on points. Fine, grand, no disgrace. But Davy will need to be more ambitious than that. Davy or somebody else. Packing one’s defence will not suffice.
Leinster will be interesting in a middleweight kinda way.
Wexford have tapped out the vein of talent they’ve been flogging since 2017 and are vulnerable. Antrim will probably frighten a bigger name without beating them. Galway will be the usual enigma wrapped in et cetera et cetera. Dublin will be difficult opposition for Wexford and Galway but have acquired a hang-up about Kilkenny.
Where the latter stand was made clear to everyone by events beside the Lee on Easter Sunday. The return of TJ Reid will at least provide the means to get them up the field and camped in the opposition half. But anyone who believed Derek Lyng faced anything less than a three-year job has been thoroughly undeceived.
Down south, much depends on the outcome in Ennis on Sunday. Given Tipperary’s capacity to score goals when they’re allowed to, and ability to subsist on points when they’re not, they may turn out to be the best among the peloton. Not if they stall on the grid against Clare, though. And Clare have Aidan McCarthy back and possess more scoring power than most.
On which point, of your columnist’s two wishes for the summer, the first is that Brian Lohan’s charges return to Croke Park for an All-Ireland semi-final and succeed in showing who they really are.
The other is that not only do referees crack down on throwing the ball this weekend, which they will, but that they crack down on it for the next few weekends too. That’ll solve the problem pretty sharpish. Look: if there’s no clear handpassing motion then it’s a foul.
It’s too much to expect the men in black to spot everything; the game is altogether too hectic for that. It is not too much to expect them to evaluate the stuff they do see and judge it accordingly.
As for Cork, whose imponderables are so numerous and complicated one dare not even begin to get into them, they should have made 2022’s last four and would require no leap to make 2023’s last four. Assuming Limerick do likewise, however, the dilemma for the pair in the other semi-final will remain as it has for the past few years. Lose honourably or win and risk the dragon’s wrath on All-Ireland day?
You know how this particular show will end up. It’s unlikely to be cinematic.
