Calm before the storm as league promises to be a blockbuster
Sunday sunshine and Saturday night lights. Cameras, action, exhilaration and fairytale champions. There was never anything like Croke Park last September and in our lifetime there almost certainly never will be. But hurling does not stand still. The summer that rained blessings from the heavens is history and Clare are no longer this year’s All-Ireland champions.
The passing of 2013 was to be mourned, and not just inside the Banner’s borders. The season granted us the most competitive and entertaining league ever, a precursor to the most competitive and entertaining championship ever. We’re not going to be that lucky again in 2014, common sense tells us so. But common sense should never be allowed to discourage optimism. We live in the hope of seeing greatness and we always will. It is part of the condition of being a sports fan.
Besides, after the rainbow-coloured events of last weekend optimism is the most understandable default setting. The new Wexford Colleges outfit acquitting themselves admirably in the Leinster championship. Doon CBS making it an all-Limerick Harty Cup showdown. The All-Ireland intermediate and junior club finals going to extra-time at Croke Park, with the Antrim and Waterford representatives shooting out the lights in the latter game. And the piece de resistance, a side from Carlow reaching an All-Ireland senior final. The St Patrick’s Day parade in Borris has had to be cancelled. Such unfortunate collateral damage. A decade ago these occurrences were either unimaginable or downright impossible. But hurling always has its good news stories.
Sometimes you just have to know where to look for them. Last weekend you didn’t have to look very far.
Straws in the wind for the forthcoming National League? A few items have blown across the road in recent weeks. Make of them what you will.
Tipperary won the Waterford Crystal the other night, an early statement of intent that needed to be made and duly was. No two counties owe their supporters more after the sorrowful mysteries of last year than themselves and Galway. Tipp at least have got the year going with a plausible looking act of contrition. It’s a start.
They beat Clare in the final. On the face of it Davy won’t be pleased with that. But deep down Davy may well be pleased with that. The party is over and spring has sprung.
He won’t have to keep roaring at the troops that they’re only as good as the last final they contested. It’s now a fact for everyone to see.
Kilkenny won the Walsh Cup. They haven’t gone away, you know. But you did know. Along the way they picked up a hitchhiker from Ballyhale, some oul’ lad with red hair whose presence trebled the gate for the semi-final against Galway in Freshford. Will he be a fixture on the field during the summer? By the end of the league we’ll know that. Because if Henry Shefflin isn’t a fixture during the league, he won’t be one during the summer.
Kilkenny or Tipperary to win the league? Very possibly.
But nominate any of the six teams in Division 1A, plus the leading pair from Division 1B, to be hoisting the silverware in May and a pundit won’t be laughed out of court. It looks that open, that even, that balanced.
And so it should. For Championship 2013 was that open, that even, that balanced. The Leinster title was won by a team from Division 1B. The Munster title was won by a team from Division 1B. The All-Ireland final was contested by the same two teams that had contested the Division 1A relegation playoff. The two teams that had contested the Division 1A final, on the other hand, were gone from the championship by the end of July.
We can’t be sure the new league will tell us who’ll win the 2014 All-Ireland. In fact, we can be fairly sure it won’t. But it may tell us who won’t win the All- Ireland. For the moment that’s enough to be going on with.
Fair enough, we did reckon on foot of last year’s league that the MacCarthy Cup was a two-horse race. Turned out we were totally, gloriously wrong. But it wasn’t that we’d utterly misread the form book or that the stewards had cause to launch an investigation. Every horse had been run on its merits. Difference was, the narrow margins of spring — with Clare ending up in a relegation playoff after 12 wides in the second half against Kilkenny had prevented them reaching the semi-final — became the narrow margins of summer — except with different teams on the right side of those margins. Expect plenty more narrow margins ahead.
A competition that has undergone more makeovers than David Bowie has received yet another facelift. Ordinarily one would deplore the reinstatement of the quarter-finals; the term “league quarter-final” is an offence against the language. Here, however, there’s a twist and it’s a neat one. Instead of two quarter-finals — a very hurling thing, that — there will be four, each played at a home venue. Think Wexford hosting Clare, Offaly hosting Kilkenny, Limerick hosting Tipperary and Galway at home to Cork.
Or indeed any other set of permutations that takes your fancy. The possibilities are unbounded.
It may well happen that someone wins the league without meaning to, and that includes a Division 1B someone. Spend the preliminary rounds building a team or developing the squad. Arrive in the quarter-finals regardless. Meet and beat opponents like Wexford or Offaly. Thereafter surf the wave to silverware. That was how it happened for Kilkenny last season, largely as a result of those Clare wides at Cusack Park in late March. A scrappy, lucky one-point win put them on a train they hadn’t intended boarding, and in the end they couldn’t apply the brakes.
No county ever has to win the league; that’s not its purpose or existential meaning. Yet not winning the league is a very different matter to not doing well in the league. One false move, or perhaps two one-score losses, and a team is suddenly in a morass not of their own making.
Ask Anthony Daly, who is anxious to avoid a repetition of 2012: a series of decent performances, a series of unfortunate defeats (imagine scoring six goals in Nowlan Park and losing), relegation and then a championship disaster. Dublin, whose defeat to a mishmash Kilkenny in the Walsh Cup final was vaguely disquieting, will be putting their best foot forward from the off.
Tipperary will be prominent over the next few weeks for reasons already outlined. Galway possess similar motivation but may find it harder to put a winning run together. The holders will make a burst for it because, Cody’s Kilkenny being Cody’s Kilkenny, an alternative way of life does not exist for them. And Derek McGrath’s Waterford will be a team to keep an eye on, though not because they’ll be sending up fireworks just yet. One isn’t expecting anything extraordinary from Waterford this year or next year. But 2017 might see something special.
As ever, much of the value of the journey will hinge on what flowers are gathered along the way. For Tipperary the necessity is a run of sustained performances devoid of highs and lows; they don’t have to be winning by eight points but they shouldn’t be losing even one fixture by a margin of that scale. For Dublin, fresh legs in midfield. For Kilkenny, fresh legs in defence and preferably two pairs thereof. For Cork, a spiky wing-back. For Waterford, a John Mullane throwback who’ll transform them from solid competitors into genuine contenders. For Galway, half a new team. As for Offaly and Wexford, unless they do something silly along the way, they’ll have a quarter-final against top-flight opposition to aim towards. Not a bad carrot.
Then there’s Limerick. To declare that the horror of Croke Park last August compromised their Munster title is to overdo it; to declare that at the very least it tarnished the memory of that splendid, sun-splashed afternoon at the Gaelic Grounds a month earlier is not to. Not since Dublin’s heads exploded in Semple Stadium during the closing 15 minutes of the All Ireland quarter-final against Limerick themselves in 2009, Daly’s first year in charge, has there been as publicly graphic an example of a team’s skills breaking down under pressure in a big game.
One item that can be taken as read in Donal O’Grady’s second coming is that he’ll have his new-old charges coached to within an inch of their lives to ensure no systems failures, regardless of how hot the room becomes.
Limerick to reach the last four. Tipp to win it.
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