Will Tipperary hurlers crack Waterford code?

Those of you who’ve been keeping a close eye on Waterford of late will know what to expect tomorrow. Those of who you haven’t merely need to study the photograph above.

Striking, eh? It’s from TG4’s coverage of last month’s quarter-final against Galway at Walsh Park and it doesn’t need much in the way of annotation.

Six Waterford men, not including the goalkeeper, inside their own 45’; three more in the vicinity of the Galway player (Andy Smith) in possession; and, all told, four spare white shirts in shot. This is Waterford 2015.

Bodies everywhere except in the other half of the field. Hurling’s latest intellectual puzzle. Here we are now, deconstruct us.

It’s quite the mission statement and in addition to accusations along the lines of “the new Donegal” it’s led, rather less sensationally, to a striking reaction from Limerick’s Seamus Hickey.

Waterford, he asserted recently, are “an interesting team” and not one he wanted to face again any time soon.

Fair enough, “interesting” may not be a huge compliment in hurling terms. There is no such entity in hurling as an interesting unsuccessful team, and Waterford-as-interesting may well prove to be little more than a mild passing phenomenon.

Chances are that in four months time they’ll be out of the championship and we’ll have long forgotten how intriguing they once appeared to be.

For the moment they remain an unusual organism, scarcely exotic but well worthy nonetheless of being placed on a petri dish, there to be poked and prodded and examined through a microscope. Such will be the case tomorrow. There won’t be a prospective championship opponent in Munster who won’t record the match and treat it to several viewings.

How do Waterford kill space in defence? Of what length, line and angle are their clearances? What particular areas of space do Jake Dillon and his colleagues – frequently “this colleague” — colonise in an underpopulated forward line and at what angle do they attack the sliotar? How should the opposition midfielders and half-backs deploy with a view to closing them down? And so on.

Derek McGrath’s thinking is not hard to discern. Developing teams require delicate nurturing. Delicate nurturing is incompatible with the mishaps of last year’s league campaign, in particular the five goals shipped in Ennis and the four goals conceded in Nowlan Park.

The current Déise configuration may not be easy on the eye but it’s a comfort blanket for a bunch of youngsters who’ll inevitably make mistakes, and McGrath’s priority is – rightly — the confidence and well-being of his players rather than the edification of the paying customers.

The big-picture stuff. The problem with quid pro quo deals is that, while not involving supping with long spoons, they still necessitate trading arrangements with those unsleeping gentlemen of business named Peter and Paul.

A gameplan based on superior fitness, quick striking and precision deliveries has by its nature a finite shelf life. Defending in depth means attacking on the run in flying columns, with a minimum of crumbs allowed fall from the table.

Nine or ten wides is four or five too many, and God help a defensively configured team that ends up having to chase the game. Waterford can win matches in springtime partly by virtue of being the fitter outfit; that advantage will have disappeared by high summer.

That they won’t win the All-Ireland this year is neither here nor there. McGrath isn’t trying to win the 2015 All-Ireland. What he’s trying to do is position Waterford to win, say, the 2018 All-Ireland. In a colleges setting McGrath was the messiah with De La Salle.

In the intercounty arena the most he’ll amount to with Waterford is John the Baptist: the manager before the manager who leads them to All-Ireland glory, or perhaps even the manager before that. One suspects he doesn’t really mind.

So Waterford, broadly like Clare 2013, set up with bolts on every door and a state of the art alarm system. Grand. Whatever floats one’s boat. Whatever a manager believes he has to do to win, or at any rate to be competitive. Relax.

Hurling is not becoming the new football, the Déise have not been transmogrified into Inter Milan circa 1965 and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are not togging out in the Walsh Park dressing rooms even as we speak, bent on laying waste to an unsuspecting land.

Tipp? The overturning of Seamus Callanan’s suspension rights what looked a serious injustice and may assist in tilting the balance tomorrow. Noel McGrath’s misfortune had already robbed them of one of their point scorers; Callanan’s return means that they won’t be shorn of their leading goal threat too.

Tipperary routinely break the 20-point barrier when it comes to raising white flags. If they break the 20-point barrier here there’ll be nothing routine about it. They’ll break it because they’ve earned it and because, in this instance, Waterford have made them earn it.

Whether it happens tomorrow or down the line, someone will crack Waterford’s code. They’ll play their way through them or around them or over them and Derek McGrath will have to go away and do some thinking and return with an upgraded model, complete with new improved bells and whistles. It is part of the warp and weft, the action and reaction, of team sport.

But hurling folk should be glad of McGrath, glad, a la Davy Fitz two years ago, somebody else out there has the imagination to try something different, heedless of the usual guff about “playing your position”. One of the drawbacks with hurling was not that it was too tactical. It was wasn’t tactical enough.