Tipp and Kilkenny ticked all the boxes

The selection process

There are very good reasons why. Here goes.

Player turnover in Cork has been immense; the Darren Sweetnam of 2012 may well have been here had he hung around and kicked on but he didn’t. Limerick have travelled a distance but, in the words of the venerable sage Steven Patrick Morrissey, the last mile is the hardest mile. Wexford weren’t sighted till last summer. Waterford have been in decline for age-profile reasons. Dublin have mixed the excellent (a National League and a Leinster title) with the abject. Galway have been more Galwayesque than ever.

Why not a bigger Banner contingent? Simple. Though Clare won an All-Ireland, and did so in rapturous fashion, the summer before and the summer afterwards they departed the championship in the qualifiers. So, while we’ll be amazed if in five years’ time Tony Kelly, Colm Galvin and Conor McGrath aren’t on the Team of the Decade, they haven’t sufficient cash in their account to make this particular XV.

A couple more number one hits will do it.

All of this leaves our selection dominated by two counties. One contested four All-Ireland finals during the period under review. The other contested six, winning three and for good measure doing a NHL treble as well. That our team will be wearing stripes of blue and gold and black and amber is because it has to be. Three words: body of work.

The one big challenge in finessing our product entailed getting Joe Canning and TJ Reid into a forward line that also included Richie Hogan. Out of sheer cravenness – ahem, I mean in a masterstroke of tactical acumen – we put Hogan at midfield, where potential partners for Michael Fennelly weren’t exactly leaping out of the undergrowth. Problem solved. Having thus advertised his deep hurling insight, your correspondent is available as a selector this year for any mediocre intermediate team prepared to pay him outrageous mileage.

Fair enough if you feel we’ve been desperately boring and painfully predictable. You can console yourself with the thought that the second half of the decade will be more democratic and that half of these guys won’t be here this time in 2019. As to how many of our Most Likely Challengers will have replaced them, that will be the interesting part.