The Ciotóg Side

The first big weekend, as mood music, fell flat. 

Depressing couple of days for hurling, according to a friend during our usual Monday morning post mortem. His take never left kilter, as the week wore on.

The reality is that people prefer novelty over quality. It is human nature, what put a man on the moon.

Last September’s drawn All Ireland Final was probably the finest game of hurling ever seen, with that replay not far behind. Yet Joe Public, understandably, was much more taken with the previous September’s draw and replay, even though a lot of the hurling between Clare and Cork now seems, on mature reflection, close to a swizz.

See, there was drama aplenty in last Saturday’s qualifiers but oddly little excitement.

Something got lost in a promising mix. Beyond the results, people were eyeing those four qualifier teams in a particular optic: could any of them topple Kilkenny or Tipperary down the road? General reaction was irritable, a kind of eye strain. The verdict on Cork and Dublin hung diffident: ‘Wouldn’t beat a lot…’for now, like that probe to Pluto, Clare and Limerick are gone into a cold and distant speculation. Their Senior summer is over.

Thankfully, Clare’s U21 victory over Waterford on Wednesday evening sparkled.

Forget a minute how this result levered further pressure onto Davy Fitzgerald. That story will run and on.

Much more interesting was a remark by Clare U21 manager Dónal Moloney when interviewed afterwards on TG4. He queried whether his charges would have beaten Waterford if the latter had set up 15 on 15. Same as their Senior team, the Waterford U21s deployed Tadhg de Búrca as a sweeper, thereby allowing their opponents the same facility. Unusually frank, Moloney thought not, had the contest been 15 on 15.

Post-match reaction can be ‘in vino veritas’, truth in the rush of the moment. The topic certainly deserves thought. Broadly speaking, the sweeper or the third midfielder is an underdog’s gambit.

As of early 2015, the Waterford Seniors were rank underdogs, smarting from trimmings by Clare and Kilkenny. The gambit made eminent sense.

Equally, you can understand Séamus ‘Cheddar’ Plunkett utilizing sweepers with Laois. The priority, with a haemorrhage, is staunching it. Constant double digit defeat drains even the most resilient. The sweeper tourniquet, in this context, is sound medicine.

Those from a county with a winning tradition rarely enough understand the psychological obstacles that have to be overcome in places with the opposite tradition, which is the vast majority of counties. Here is the nigh miraculous achievement of Jim McGuinness in Donegal.

So Derek McGrath was sensible, as of early 2015. But the Waterford U21s, Wednesday evening? They were 1/3 favourites.

Why field in a fashion that available talent rendered unnecessary? Waterford set up as if they had to contain Clare, whereas the dynamic, in truth, ran the other way round.

Waterford’s U21s constantly ran the ball into contact, losing possession. They passed short for the sake of passing short. They hit long range wides when a percentaged delivery was proper option. Then again, long range pops look attractive when the situation inside is three on two or three on one.

Three points down with ten minutes left, Waterford surely had to push up 15 on 15.

Here is where a system becomes a straightjacket. And you could make a similar observation about the last ten minutes of last Sunday’s Munster Final.

This talk of different systems reminds me of a recent comment on The Sunday Game. Discussing Liam Rushe’s best position, Dónal Óg Cusack dismissed restoring him to defence.

According to Cusack, he would look like a centre back “from the last decade” by comparison with Mark Ellis’ finesse as a sweeper. Yet Liam Rushe’s display at centre back last Saturday powered Dublin’s win over Limerick.

Cusack is a significant figure. His ideas are influential and deserve respect. Even so, this one counts as dubious.

Clare’s Seánie MacMahon, the finest centre back I have seen, found heyday in the 1990s. He was still hurling strong in the mid 2000s but MacMahon’s genius is as 1990s as a preference for Blur or Oasis.

The notion that everything is getting better all the time might be called ‘present-ism’.

Cusack seems to have caught a dose of it. The past is not always an inferior country.

Someone’s playing decade is hardly a true yardstick of excellence. Where would such present-ist logic lead? By that yardstick, Niall O’Meara is already a better ciotóg hurler than the mourned Jimmy Doyle.

Is Mark Ellis, simply because he is hurling in the 2010s, better than Rónan Curran? Ellis might be in time but hardly on the basis of mere chronology.

Besides, where would broader logic lead? Roddy Doyle as express better than James Joyce? Taylor Swift as express better than Patsy Cline? Gifted half backs, including Clare’s Anthony Daly and Liam Doyle, hurled before the 2010s. Wonderful stickmen, such as John Conran (Wexford) and John Taylor (Laois), are almost forgotten, even though they hurled as recently as the 1980s.

Everyone recalls how 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) opens, the famous sequence in which a bone is thrown into the air by an apeman. That impulse becomes, aeons later, the prompt behind space travel. Such is progress, horror done and glory come.

You are the Stanley Kubrick of hurling documentaries. Your film begins with a sliotar being tossed up. Then footage of Seánie MacMahon letting off a front foot clearance in 1997, striking over his right shoulder while running back towards his own goal. Or of Liam Doyle switch hitting, tight within his own body space, a scoring clearance to Jamesie O’Connor.

Continue into interplanetary swoops and the waltzing Strauss score. Then footage of a current goalkeeper offering a short puckout to a sweeper, before the titles for 2015: A Hurling Odyssey.

Would that opening make sense in view of what we saw this last week?