Kilkenny’s cupboard is running dangerously bare

There’s no need to go into contortions about Limerick’s prospects.

Granted, they’re scoring goals, albeit they’ll need a better puckout strategy than they had against Tipperary two months ago. They have a nice-looking blend of youth and experience. They have momentum. Their confidence is high.

Against Clare last time out they played a game they were comfortable with, simple and direct and unfussy. And after all the hoo-hah about their alleged lack of fitness earlier in the season, John Allen and his management team are entitled to feel ever so quietly smug.

It’s now clear they were playing the long game, determined to produce their charges in peak condition for where and when it mattered most: the height of summer.

Some day soon there will dawn a day, possibly even an entire championship, that will be about Limerick. But tomorrow is not that day. Tomorrow is about Kilkenny.

Is this the day it ends? The day when Óisín comes back from Tír na nÓg, hits the ground and is suddenly seen to be withered, ancient, mortal? In a sense, of course, the scenario has already come to pass. Croke Park three weeks ago was the day we discovered these mythological figures had aged and slowed. The same happened to Eddie Keher, Pat Henderson et al in the 1976 Leinster final. But in 1976 the only thing a back door led to was the garden.

If the backlash materialises — if indeed they still have a backlash in them — then the champions will win and win well. In that event be prepared to listen to the world and its mother proclaim that a team beaten in the Division 2 final couldn’t possibly have come within an ass’s roar of the team that won the Division 1 final pulling a train.

If they can win without cannibalising their reserves, all the better for them. It’s no insult to Limerick to say this is a match Kilkenny are required to play with one eye on a prospective semi-final against Tipp.

But if the MacCarthy Cup holders are what they looked against Galway, then all bets are off. In which case, sooner rather than later they’ll be shoved over the edge of the cliff by a younger, hungrier and more motivated team.

The break won’t have done them any harm. The failure to raise a gallop against Galway, a fortnight after they’d given it socks against Dublin, can be ascribed to nothing more complex than an inability — understandable at this stage in the lifespan of the team, even if we didn’t see it coming — to get going twice in the space of three weekends.

Is there any team in hurling history more entitled to an off-day? No. Would a back-door All-Ireland for Kilkenny now be tarnished slightly? Yes. Will Shefflin and the rest of them view it the same way? No chance. They’re players, not philosophers. Next game. Next ball.

However, the cupboard is running dangerously bare. The hurling equivalent of the melting of the polar ice caps has occurred.

Even if the notion a few years back that Kilkenny’s all-singing, all-dancing subs’ bench constituted the second best team in the country was demonstrably risible — it’s easy to look good coming on when you’re winning by 10 points — Brian Cody did possess match-turners: witness the difference the subs made in the closing quarter of the 2009 All-Ireland final.

Now, though, he can no longer cope without his marquee players. JJ Delaney, Michael Fennelly and Michael Rice weren’t just missing for the Leinster final, they were missed.

He’ll need them tomorrow and he’ll need the game’s most consistently brilliant player of the past nine years — red helmet, wears number five, hails from Tullaroan — back to his old self.

In that case Óisín will remain on the horse for another three weeks.