Countdown over as season’s dreams begin here

Hurling: If your Sunday night drinking buddies are anything like my Sunday night drinking buddies, dear reader, and I rather suspect they may be — assuming you possess Sunday night drinking buddies to begin with — they’ll have been counting down the days for weeks now.

Counting down the days to next weekend.

“No more matches to talk about for another two months,” as one of my lot grumbled the night of the Leinster club final last December. It wasn’t that his team had won and couldn’t wait for the All-Ireland semi-finals; his team hadn’t even been playing. It was more because yer man was a hurling man and therefore the hurling world was his oyster. The Leinster club final had been live on TG4 and therefore was of interest to yer man and to all hurling folk, irrespective of province and provenance. Like all TV games, it was the sporting equivalent of an interesting new species of insect, to be watched in real time and dissected at leisure afterwards.

One doesn’t have to be a staunch club man or woman to lament the close season. One doesn’t have to be a season-ticket follower of the county team. One merely has to like one’s hurling. There’s nothing wrong with being a barstool pundit. Where would we be without them? Either side of Christmas we still talk hurling, but only in the abstract. Teams of the year. Games of the year. Some young lad we know about who might make an impression in the coming season. But talking hurling in the abstract is equivalent to sampling those Jacob’s chocolate biscuits without the little red jelly star. We don’t like having to accept a substitute for the real thing.

We are observers, analysts, scientists. We need live, pulsing evidence. We need a heartbeat. We need action. From next Saturday, we’ll get it.

The 2015 league is here. The boys — Davy, Cody, JBM, the economics professor — are back in town.

The trifecta is complete. St Brigid’s Day, the coursing in Clonmel and the start of the national leagues. For many of the plain people of Ireland, 2015 is only properly underway now.

The eve of every new season brings with it the usual portfolio of varying requirements. This one is no exception. Clare needing to rediscover the mojo of 2013. Cork needing to banish the memory of Croke Park last August. Tipperary needing to find a full-back. Kilkenny needing to refurbish their panel and find a full-back. Dublin needing to impress and encourage their new manager from the off. Galway needing... a trip to Lourdes? That’s only Division 1A. Division 1B has its own stories.

Followers of horses and greyhounds are accustomed to keeping an eye out for animals running on at the end of a race, and Division 1B contains two horses running on at the end of last summer’s race: Limerick and Wexford. Granted, it ended horribly, albeit not altogether surprisingly, badly for Wexford at Semple Stadium in July, but the point stands. These are two counties ploughing a steady course in the right direction. Further progress can be expected in the coming months.

Already, Limerick have taken another step forward by winning the Waterford Crystal. A small step but a step, nonetheless. Those cautious souls who cautioned it was only January and only the Waterford Crystal missed the reality; with Limerick it can never be “only January” or “only the Waterford Crystal”. The trophy cabinet in the boardroom on the Ennis Road is not so bulging as to allow any new memento to be unwelcome. Good habits become catching, and winning is the most desirable habit of all.

While the sad and cautionary tale of the lost U21 boys of a decade ago makes one chary of forecasting big things for the men in green, it’s no leap to say folk on Shannonside are entitled to look forward to the next three to five years — and no mistake, five years may well be how long the conquest of Everest will take — with some optimism. Let’s count the ways.

They have a cadre of established players in or approaching their prime; they have, crucially, a cohort in the 18-20 age group who are accustomed to provincial finals in July and Croke Park in August; the failure to win last year’s All-Ireland minor final, in part the result of misfortune allied to the lack of nous required to surf a game’s waves, may turn out to be a blessing (the disappointment of 2010 certainly didn’t do Clare minors any harm in the long run); the county board were swift and decisive in giving TJ Ryan a new term; the appointment of Anthony Daly as director of hurling was a bold and imaginative step; and clubs from the county are capturing provincial titles again and in Kilmallock’s case reaching national finals.

From this remove the surface of the millpond finally appears to be placid. One sincerely trusts these do not prove to be famous last words. Limerick may not win the All-Ireland this year and they probably won’t win the league this year. But keep an eye on them anyway, this year and next year and the year after.

Kilmallock’s good news is clearly bad short-term news for TJ Ryan, who’ll do very well to see off Waterford and Wexford in the battle for promotion. Happily, Wexford’s list of needs is nowhere near as lengthy as it was two or three years ago; call it the Liam Dunne Effect. Unhappily, Offaly’s list of needs still is, and it was disturbing to see Brian Whelahan moved to lament his charges’ lack of aggression in the Walsh Cup defeat to Galway. Wexford, Limerick, Laois — who no opponent will take for granted — and Waterford to make it to the quarter-finals? Probably.

With no fewer than four teams from Division 1B again scheduled to participate in the quarter-finals, it is far from a perfect system. But handing home venue to the Division 1B sides ensured that two of last year’s quarter-finals — Kilkenny’s trip to Wexford Park and the visit of Clare, then MacCarthy Cup holders, to Portlaoise — became mini-events in themselves. And those four quarter-finals meant no dead rubbers in the concluding round of the opening phase. The upshot was a 76% rise in gate receipts for the competition. A decade ago there was a solid case to be made for deeming the Fitzgibbon Cup to be a more hotly contested than the league. No more.

An improbable-sounding scenario cannot be ruled out in Division 1A: Kilkenny struggling. Yes, really.

They face trips to Cork and Thurles and Galway. No easy ask, even for the league and All-Ireland champions. The kicker is that they’ll face all of them without five of the 17 men who did battle at Croke Park on the last Saturday of September and with no Brian Hogan, Tommy Walsh or Aidan Fogarty to plug the gaps either. In the short term, and perhaps for the rest of the year, the Kilkenny bench will be more depleted than it has ever been in the Cody era. That’ll be grist to his mill, of course. Old season gone, medals put away. New season here, places to be fought for and the entire building to be redecorated. He’ll love it. Cody won’t particularly mind losing as long as the spirit is willing and the flesh strong. But he won’t like losing too many, and Kilkenny straining to put points on the board could be a story from the league.

And the colours of the man lifting the trophy in May? Heaven knows. Everyone wants to win the All-Ireland but sometimes it’s possible to win the league despite yourself. So, like a crafty politician steeped in cliché, rule nobody in and nobody out.

Twelve months ago we opted for blue and gold and were a dodgy umpiring call plus a Hogan/Reid give-and-go away from being right. There’s no obvious reason not to venture it again. Tipp’s league. Maybe.