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.