Brian Hogan: Tactical battles motivated by finding ways to beat Kilkenny

Amid raging debate about the growing prevalence of tactics in hurling, former Kilkenny All-Ireland-winning captain Brian Hogan argues that increased tactical awareness has been motivated by desire to find a way to beat the Cats.

Crediting the Cork team of the mid-noughties with starting the wave of tactical innovation, Hogan wrote in his column on gaa.ie: “Tactics aren’t a new phenomenon — they’ve been around in some form or other for a number of years — but they certainly became more prevalent with the success of the Cork team in 2004 and ’05. Their new, running, short-passing game ignited much debate back then, even among their own fans. Perhaps the emphasis on tactics during these years was driven from an effort to try and break Kilkenny’s run of success.”

With Tipperary’s emergence in the late 2000s, Hogan admits he was impressed by the county’s willingness to take on Kilkenny with little concern for their opponents’ reputation.

“It’s easy to drop a man or two back and hope to stifle the opposition, but what I respected about Tipp was their determination to strategically play to their strengths and try to take the game to their opposition.

“They had a belief that while their defenders could hold their own, their forwards could outscore any competition, once the game was played on their terms.

“Undeniably, this was one of the greatest challenges to the Kilkenny team that I was a part of over the last 10 years.

“It forced us to rethink things and look at different aspects of our own play, but it was a challenge that we relished as a group of players and resulted in those victories being some of the sweetest.”

Hogan also played down the influence of tactics over this weekend’s quarter-finals and pointed out skill and hard work remain the first building blocks of success.

“Some people will have you believe that matches are now decided by the team with the best tactics. That drawing a parallelogram on a screen to highlight the space created in the corner of a pitch implies that this is the source for one team’s success over another.

“While I’ll be the first to admit that space is a defender’s enemy and we strive to limit it, it’s also true to say the space never scored a goal.”