Michael Moynihan: Mining for hurling positives on Jones’ Road

In the stroll down Jones’s Road yesterday afternoon, the general consensus was that Dublin’s meeting with Longford in the Leinster football championship would be a rerun of Christians-Lions (Coliseum, vespers), with no guesses as to which side were going to be portraying the early converts, or the main course.

The curtain-raiser? That turned out to be an affair of all Christians and no ferocious mammals. Dublin and Galway’s dour clash in the Leinster hurling championship was, for lengthy stretches, a matter of what wasn’t happening, and the fact that it ended without a definitive result was in tune with the general proceedings.

Everywhere you looked in GAA HQ there was a confrontation which wasn’t working out as expected, or hoped. The clash of Iarla Tannian of Galway and Dublin’s Liam Rushe, for instance, looked on paper like a re-run of Ali-Foreman in Zaire, but it never really materialised, with Rushe eventually moving to the wing in order to have an impact.

Likewise the prospect of Joe Canning taking on Peter Kelly, though the Dublin defender’s injury meant he didn’t see 35 minutes on the field, while Canning was clearly hampered by the hand injury which had threatened his participation in the game.

Elsewhere in the game there were a good deal of aimless clearances, anathema in the modern game (and never too welcome in the old game either), as well as poor shooting choices, with players working hard to make ground or win possession before spoiling their efforts with a wayward shot or misplaced pass.

A succession of errors in the 32nd minute summed it up: Kelly was calm gathering a loose ball that shot up into the air before dropping into the Dublin goalmouth, but he had his pocket picked by Canning coming out of the square, the sliotar rolling loose. With the goal not yawning as much as tucked in and awaiting a lullaby, Canning blasted wide.

Dublin’s safest pair of hands and Galway’s best striker of a ball, both deficient.

We did have the most alliterative encounter so far in the championship on 24 minutes, when Colm Cronin crashed in a cracker, clawed away by Colm Callanan, but it was a rare highlight in a pedestrian first half. It wasn’t grim enough to be damned with that horrific phrase, an arm-wrestle, but it was a different order to last week’s opening 35 minutes between Clare and Limerick.

On that occasion we had two crabs staying in their shells until that red card and half-time shemozzle. There were a few plaintive pleas for some pushing and shoving at the break yesterday as well: anything to raise the blood. We also had a sparkling debut from Cian Lynch yesterday week, the kind of unexpected treat the championship sometimes throws up and sometimes doesn’t.

There was a drenching shower early in the second half which didn’t help players with their footing.. With ten minutes left it was a one-point game, though that’s not how it felt: Rushe and Sutcliffe were beginning to have an influence as the game wore down, with the former hitting a point to nudge the Dubs ahead and then winning the free that would probably have won the game for them, only for David Treacy to put it wide.

The men from the west got an equaliser through Aidan Harte and might have snatched the win late on, but the free deep in the Galway half struck by Joe Canning dropped short, so the game had a suitable ending. Two missed frees.

“Always in a draw, if you get the last point, you’re delighted to get it,” said Galway manager Anthony Cunningham afterwards.

“We found ourselves two points down from being in a strong position. We would have been disappointed. We left some scores there on the pitch, some wides and some ones we should have got.

“But all in all, I think it was a fair result so we’re delighted to be getting a second crack. And this time of the year, that’s a bonus.” His opposite number was also mining positives from the game.

“We showed great composure,” said Ger Cunningham. “In the first half it looked like we could have been under pressure, we were being opened up a few times but I thought we came back.

“In the second half we went ahead again, but it was tit-for-tat, they had a purple patch in the second half and had chances as well. Overall it was a tight game.” A neutral adjective, which is about right in terms of evaluating the game. That makes it two disappointing halves two weeks in a row in the hurling championship. Which means 2015 has all but exceeded the allotted annual quota for same. Grunting ugliness is expected with the football championship, but we anticipate more from hurling, surely.

Dublin-Galway wasn’t marred by tactical nervousness - naivete, maybe, as there was space in front of both goals that didn’t seem available to Clare or Limerick that often last week. One size doesn’t fit all is a cliche which can be applied across many platforms, but it bears repeating in this context.

Perhaps some sides could benefit from a little more structure, like the two we saw yesterday lumping the ball to free opponents and going for points from difficult angles; perhaps there are others who need a little less organisation, like the reticent first-half combatants in Thurles the previous weekend.

It doesn’t take much to tip a game from furtive to fevered, of course. It didn’t help that yesterday we saw only the one goal, a fine Joseph Cooney solo effort after he robbed Conal Keaney and strode down the middle to finish well: another green flag or two would have surely injected some adrenaline into the participants, though at the same time Alan Nolan in the Dublin goal deserves credit for two fine stops.

Were the surroundings a factor? The crowd was decent, and didn’t all arrive with the countdown beginning for the football game either, in fairness, but there were still large tracts of Croke Park as populated as Mars. Perhaps the argument about moving the Dublin footballers out of Croke Park has had the wrong focus all this time. Anthony Cunningham made a reasonable point about Galway needing to be fully integrated into the Leinster championship, including home and away fixture arrangements but the replay is scheduled for next weekend in Tullamore.

That game will be instructive. Not just because it’ll condemn either Dublin or Galway to the qualifiers, and not just because it’ll be the opening salvo in a very significant weekend overall for the hurling championship either.

It should show us if that championship has caught fire and truly come alive.