Clare need to get back on track
If the actual fare hasn’t been hectic, there’s still been no shortage of talking points and discoveries in the 2014 National Hurling League so far. Here are the key ones.
Eight days ago 14-man Clare came from behind against Dublin to record their first league or championship win in over a year. If it wasn’t automatically the kind of result that changes a county’s season at a stroke, it was certainly the kind of result that can get the train back on the tracks.
Brendan Bugler, the 15th man, recognised as much when tweeting afterwards: “That second-half performance was exceptional today by the lads. Hopefully it’ll kickstart the year. #togetherness”
He wasn’t the only man to use the media to send a message. “I’ve said all I’m going to say,” Davy Fitz declared. “Ye are making the deal out of it, not me.” And: “I tell the lads we don’t really bother with the media. We don’t read or listen to too much.”
All well and good. This was Saturday and it seemed that Davy had recognised that, in terms of PR, you’ve got to know when to hold and know when to fold. Yet four days later an issue that might have died quietly in an alleyway was back on the high street after the public statement issued by the panel. This was, if not quite kicking a sleeping dog, then kicking one that had nodded off again and that really should have been left alone.
Clearly there’s an element of the self-fulfilling prophecy about it all — ie this involves Davy and invariably Davy = news.
It’s easy to claim that none of this would be allowed happen under Brian Cody, but such an assertion omits the fact that in the summer of 2003, Cody lost two of his players, among them his captain, in very public fashion.
It’s equally easy to decree that it was always going to end in tears in Clare, Davy being Davy, but such a proposition overlooks the fact that the man spent the best part of four seasons with Waterford and managed to keep the troops inside the tent.
One of the reasons Ger Loughnane gave for walking away in 2000 was that he didn’t want to become a sort of Banner version of Winston Churchill, the man who won the war but failed to win the peace.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the current situation Davy has been unable to wash his linen behind closed doors, and that constitutes a failure in itself. Should the player outflow continue, a tipping point at which the glories of 2013, far from being pointed to as his enduring achievement, are employed as a stick with which to beat the boss will draw ever closer.
In the end all but a minuscule percentile of managers are judged on one criterion (and in those rare cases the criterion is whether they’re adjudged to have won with sufficient style). Win tomorrow and/or win a relegation playoff and the dynamic changes for Clare. The train will be back on the tracks.
What’s more, having their dressing-room issues popping on the surface now rather than bubbling under will, assuming they’re tackled and resolved as opposed to being allowed to fester, allow Clare enter the championship as a cohesive, coherent bonded entity. Should.
Will he chance one last spin on the merry go round? We’ll know soon enough, and one man who’ll be keener than anyone else to know — assuming he doesn’t already — is the other big man.
Brian Cody may have been happy, or at any rate not unhappy, last autumn had Shefflin announced his retirement.
In view of Kilkenny’s recent travails he’s unlikely to view a retirement announcement with quite the same equanimity now. He needs as many hands on deck as he can, and so much the better if they’re capable, experienced hands.
The performances against Dublin and Tipp underlined as much.
The genesis of their plight dates back a few years. Kilkenny reached three successive All-Ireland minor finals between 2008 and 2010, winning two of them. All three sides contained an inordinately high proportion of representatives from intermediate and junior clubs.
The worry expressed sotto voce at the time was that most of these youngsters were likely to fall through the cracks due to lack of exposure to a diet of regular top-class hurling, a worry that has proven well founded.
Eoin Murphy, Padraig Walsh and Cillian Buckley are the only members of the cohort one could nominate as definite starters on Cody’s first-choice XV.
Obviously there wouldn’t be a lot wrong with a forward line of Richie Hogan, Richie Power, Colin Fennelly, TJ Reid, Eoin Larkin and AN Other. But the first three subs to come on for them? Hmm. Of this much we can be certain: Kilkenny cannot afford injuries come summer.
Assuming he recovers his fitness and form, Patrick Maher will walk back onto the team. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll displace Brendan Maher at number 11.
Would the presence of two non-scorers — two men who are not there primarily to score, at any rate — on the same half-forward line weaken Tipperary? Or, paradoxically, might it strengthen them? Back in the day, the Offaly breakthrough team had another chap called Brendan at centre-forward. Brendan Bermingham.
He didn’t say much and on the face of it he didn’t do much; certainly he rarely did anything remotely spectacular. But Bermingham kept the ball moving and ensured that the enemy centre-back didn’t do much either. Just like Kieran Joyce, with Brendan Maher in his precinct, didn’t do much for Kilkenny last Sunday.
Although Maher lacks his namesake Patrick’s low-slung, scurrying posture and his ability to win the ball and go to war with it, the Borrisoleigh man, whose progress has been arrested as much by his own versatility as by injury, is mobile and tough and economical and almost always gets the dishes washed.
If Eamon O’Shea intends to field four triggermen up front (Seamus Callanan, John O’Dwyer, Noel McGrath and one of Jason Forde/John McGrath) the presence of Brendan Maher to keep the ball around the house may be more necessary rather than less necessary.
TG4 are at Wexford Park tomorrow and it’s an imaginative choice. In fact it’s a pity they didn’t go the whole hog and make Wexford v Waterford, the promotion decider, their live match rather than affording it deferred coverage. Waterford’s draw at the Gaelic Grounds on the opening night looked a good result at the time and looks an even better result now. Still, it would be no disaster if they failed tomorrow.
As was argued here recently, another season developing quietly, away from the lights of the hothouse, would not be the worst of all possible worlds for Derek McGrath’s young charges. Home advantage might swing this Wexford’s way.
As for Limerick, all that happened last weekend was a narrow defeat in a match where they were forced to play 68 minutes with 14 men. Disappointing, yes, but not the usual Limerick pratfall or in any way indicative of a deeper malaise.
Even allowing for Kilmallock’s Croke Park no-show, the end of the world is not yet nigh on Shannonside.
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