Walsh: Cats will learn from Leinster final hurt

If there was one particular incident from the Leinster final that told you this wasn’t the usual Kilkenny, it was Tommy Walsh’s fresh-air shot from a sideline ball at the end of Galway’s incredible opening 30-minute spell.

Walsh isn’t a sideline specialist but a fresh-air shot? From one of the finest stickmen in the business? And this just minutes after he had hit another sideline ball directly to Joe Canning, who promptly dispatched the ball a mile over the Kilkenny crossbar? Perhaps ‘spell’ is the apt word because Kilkenny did indeed look mesmerised, spellbound.

Tommy’s own take on his series of mishaps? “It was very disappointing, I suppose I didn’t see Joe tipping up to midfield there. You’d think you would learn from the first time but it was just one of those days, the second one went straight to him and the third one I missed it. I wasn’t rattled, that’s just what happened.”