Cats out of the bag early withsame tactics

After Saturday’s demolition of Dublin, critics will now question the All-Ireland champions at their peril.

“Keep writing about the football, boys.”

Kilkenny secretary Ned Quinn’s remark towards the media after Saturday’s game was quite the cryptic one. Was it a reference to those few in the press who had anticipated Dublin were sizing Kilkenny up for a fall?

Or was it a nod towards the amount written about the travails of the county’s footballers earlier in the season?

Either way, there was an indignant tone in the words.

It was well known Kilkenny officials weren’t happy with the Saturday fixture. As All-Ireland champions, they expected a better billing, while there was also a level of disgruntlement with the appointment of Barry Kelly.

Portlaoise on a Saturday with Kelly officiating was the equivalent of asking a Jewish person to attend services conducted by a Catholic priest in a mosque on a non-Sabbath day.

Their awesome performance in O’Moore Park was hardly a response to that but there was a sense of resentment in them too.

They had been forearmed about Dublin’s intentions for this game. Richie Power admitted as much afterwards. Anthony Daly’s side had let it be known that they marked this game as their priority — but so too had Kilkenny.

“We knew what was coming. Since the league final, even though I wasn’t involved I knew the task that was going to be in front of us and Dublin had been targeting this game.

“The league campaign that they had, they wouldn’t have been overly happy with it. Things went right for us on the day, Dublin probably had an off-day but all we could was turn up and hurl as best we could.”

Kilkenny, like so many times before, had steeled themselves for something that failed to manifest itself in the face of the Cats’ petrifying phalanx.

“We couldn’t be worrying about what Dublin were saying, what Dublin were training or what Dublin were doing,” insisted JJ Delaney. “We had to keep our own house in order and we did that for the five weeks coming up to it and preparation went very, very well.”

The truth is while Kilkenny may talk of Dublin as rivals there’s an element in them that see the Dubs as upstarts. There’s respect — look at how Liam Rushe was double-marked in the air in O’Moore Park — but do they actually see the capital as rivals?

They don’t forget easy either. Last year’s league final defeat to Dublin hurt them. Henry Shefflin, usually the stoic master of talking much and saying little, enlightened us of his motivations.

Asked last June who he would like to face in the Leinster final, Dublin or Galway, he said: “I think you know the answer to that.”

He quickly corrected himself but the cat was already out of the bag.

There’s been a sense of incredulity in Kilkenny about how they were being made out to be lame without the two Michaels, Fennelly and Rice. Hadn’t anyone learned from last year that you question the Cats at your peril?

“Brian always harps on — you get injuries, you have to move on,” said Power. “Our panel has been as strong as it has ever been this year and we knew that we had guys to come in. Look at Paddy Hogan and Cillian Buckley, the two of them were outstanding in the middle of the field.”

There were also doubts about the match fitness of Power himself and Shefflin. Power had missed the league final with a knee problem while Shefflin hadn’t played a competitive inter-county game after a long recovery from shoulder surgery.

Power’s 1-3 tally put paid to any fears about him while even though all of Shefflin’s 10 points came from placed balls his contribution was still worthy of merit.

“After picking up the injury in the club game, I didn’t get to train as much as I could,” recounted Power. “I was fresh coming in and in one way that can be a good thing too. Henry was the same. I knew by Henry and the work he put in over the last six months that he was raring to go.”

Kilkenny did their bit to make this game something of a spectacle; Dublin most certainly didn’t do theirs. Contrary to what the recent training sessions had shown, their basic skills were incredibly poor.

In the numerous unsightly scrambles on the ground, it was invariably a Kilkenny man who emerged with possession. Their tactic was the same as ever — from the very outset, faster pussycat kill, kill.

“We were expecting a huge game,” stated Delaney, wearing an icepack on his hand. “We’ve been training for the last five weeks and we were expecting huge battle.

“We wanted to meet them head-on in the first few minutes and meet their intensity and then get the better of them. If you look at the first-half the two goals were the telling issues.”