‘It’s been a hard road back’

OLLIE MORAN yesterday paid tribute to Richie Bennis and his management team for keeping belief in him at centre-forward.

Though he has been moved around the field like a pawn on a chess board since his championship debut against Waterford ten years ago Moran has played most of his hurling in the half-back line in recent years.

Limerick’s offence, not their defence, has been their greatest problem area in recent times though and Bennis’ decision to hand the big man the number 11 jersey has paid rich dividends.

Man of the match in the first of the three games against Tipperary last month, Moran came to the fore again during the replay’s closing chapter and he chipped in with another three points in the deciding encounter.

Under those circumstances, he was the obvious choice for player of the month awards from both Vodafone and Opel this week.

“A lot of people would have said that I didn’t settle in too well at the start of the year,” joked the man who earned an All-Star nomination as a forward back in 2001.

“There’s two types of players — a back and a forward — and you are instinctively one or the other.

“It did take a lot of time to settle in to it. Fair play to the management, they persevered when all around them were saying that I should be heading back down the field but coming up to the championship, I felt things were beginning to work out well for me.”

The dark days of recent years seem a long time ago now in a week when the side is preparing for it’s first provincial decider in six years. Moran hopes the ending of such a depressing sequence can allow them express themselves more freely against Waterford.

“It became a mental block after a while. Maybe now that the monkey is off our back we might be able to open up and hurl a little bit more.

“A lot of players have taken a lot of criticism from our own press and our own supporters and confidence started ebbing away since 2001 when we were last in a Munster final.

“It’s been a hard road back. But we have still only won one game. One game in six years is a terrible return for any inter-county team.”

The pairing of Limerick and Waterford is the first truly novel Munster final since Clare took two attempts at cracking the Déise in 1998 but the absence of Cork from the decider for the first time in five years won’t make Limerick’s lot any easier.

“The form team in the country at the moment are Waterford. Themselves and Cork have been the trend setters in Munster. You don’t need me to tell you how good Waterford are.”

For all the plaudits that came Limerick — and Tipperary’s — way in recent weeks, their June exploits have had many a hole picked in them by some hurling purists who claim the standard of games was not that high.

Whatever about the legitimacy of such claims, Moran accepts that the semi-final clashes pointed to some worrying trends, not least the five goals Tipperary scored and the countless others they passed up on.

Waterford will have taken as much notice of Limerick’s tendency to fall off the pace of games at times, particularly in the first replay when they trailed by ten points at one stage. Anything less than 70 minutes of the highest intensity Sunday and they will be in serious trouble.

“We probably wouldn’t get away with it (again). There’s no point saying otherwise. Tipp, in fairness, hit a purple patch in the first half of the second game and if that was Waterford they might have put another six points on top of the ten that Tipp put on us.

“We have been in that position with Waterford once before where you take your eye off the ball and drop your intensity and they punished us.”