Tribesmen saved by Can-do attitude

Galway looked dead and buried before a remarkable finale to the Leinster SHC semi-final saw them live to fight another day.

How do you like your eggs in the morning? More to the point, how do you like your 10-point turnarounds and sensational closing seconds?

A cursory glance at the result of yesterday’s Leinster SHC semi-final shows a draw between Kilkenny and Galway. A clearer picture would emerge if you’d hooked up an observer to a heart monitor for the closing 10 minutes: the print-out would resemble the Himalayas.

The dawning sense of the inevitable as Galway tattooed in three goals in the closing five minutes spread through the body in Tullamore yesterday the way the red glow from a bowl of Ready Brek suffused consumers in the old TV ad.

Joe Canning’s late penalty — the third of those Galway goals — to tie the game up seemed the perfect full stop to that heart-stopping package of action.

Turns out it was a semi-colon; a brief pause before the real excitement.

Kilkenny went down field from the puck-out and the ball came to a man in black and amber in full flight along the sideline. Henry Shefflin: point. Cats one ahead with 72 minutes gone.

Galway went down field from their puck-out and once Joe Canning got the ball out of his feet, as Johnny Giles puts it, he had a sight of goal from the sideline: point. Level. Over.

“Two top players, everybody knows that,” said Kilkenny manager Brian Cody afterwards.

“Two super points, simple as that. Ordinary players would find it difficult. Neither of those players are ordinary and they just tapped them over the bar.”

His Galway counterpart was all for us having a little less stress in our lives.

“I thought honestly Johnny [Ryan, referee] would have blown it up after the [Canning] penalty went in,” said Anthony Cunningham.

“Then Henry got a super score in the corner. Joe equalled it, then. Last puck of the game, out on the sideline... yeah, he got it and you’d put your house on him because he’s a fantastic forward, but as I say, it won’t mean anything until we get over the line next weekend.”

We’ll leave the cold analysis of next weekend for another day. Luxuriate in the improbability of coming back from a 10-point deficit with seven minutes left in regulation time: Galway hit 3-1 in eight minutes, having conceded 1-8 without reply in the middle of the second half. The mountain they climbed can’t even be obscured by an accountant’s recitation of the facts.

As for the rest of the game, Cunningham was entitled to be disappointed by his team’s collapse after Canning’s first penalty goal: that score tied the game and yet Kilkenny blitzed Galway afterwards, with the Tribesmen were unable to stop the rot.

For the Galway management, the string of lazy frees conceded around the Kilkenny half-back line gave the Cats the platform to take over for that period of the game, and it’s likely to be one of the first issues needing address.

That stretch of the game was in the nature of a triumphal procession for Kilkenny: the second-loudest cheer from their supporters then was for Tommy Walsh, who got the fourth point in that sequence of scores.

The loudest cheer, though, was for Shefflin, on as a 62-minute sub for Mark Kelly. At the time, it looked like giving Shefflin a useful run-out; later it became a far more significant substitution, when he almost snatched the game with that late point.

The referendum on where to play Canning continues, by the way, like one of those EU votes where the Government simply keeps holding them until the result changes. The correct result isn’t so clear-cut with Canning, whose work sheet from yesterday’s stint in the half-forward line read as follows for the first half — a great point midway through the half, a free won which Conor Cooney converted, a long-distance wide, from middle of the field, won a free, a wide.

His second-half goals came from penalties but — perhaps tellingly — that last contribution came inside the 45m line. Maybe there’s a sign in that for Galway; their opponents certainly placed their talisman a lot closer the red zone.

Lessons for the replay? Expect it to be ferocious. More than once, there were minor flare-ups (the apposite hierarchical term for a dust-up below a melee or shemozzle but slightly more serious than handbags). Was there a niggly undertone? There certainly seemed to be a niggly overtone, with players arriving late to disagreements in order to shove opponents in the back, though that died away in the second half.

Galway said afterwards they felt there were goals in the game for them, and there were. Cunningham ended up with a forward sextet about the same height as the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA, and Galway got plenty of joy from high balls into the Kilkenny defence.

Route one isn’t always the wrong way to travel.

Conceding five goals will be a worry for Cody. It was for Vicente Del Bosque, after all, though Noreside may not welcome the comparison.

On the plus side for the Cats, Shefflin will be a week closer to a start. To judge by yesterday, that line from The Wire still applies: you come at the king, you best not miss.