Still waiting for summer to fire

Does the hunt for a cracking championship game in hurling go on?

Don’t bother taking your question to Galway or Waterford, who qualified for the All-Ireland semi-finals yesterday. August is in their future.

For Dublin and Cork, the teams they dumped out in yesterday’s double bill in Thurles, quality will hardly be an issue either, as they come to terms with a July exit from the championship.

The 33,150 in attendance saw a decent game in Waterford’s clinical dismissal of the Dubs, but Galway routed Cork by a dozen points in a contest that was dead from the 50th minute. No one was perching on the edge of their seat yesterday in Semple Stadium.

An early goal in that Cork-Galway clash established the template for a one-sided encounter. After 40 seconds, Galway’s Jonathan Glynn picked up the ball and meandered a good 40m through the opposing half without encountering a significant challenge, ending up eyeball to eyeball with Anthony Nash before shovelling the ball home.

That was the first half in miniature. Cork gave up a procession of cheap scores before the break — an interesting statistical analysis would be to break down those Galway scores according to the pressure those forwards were under. All too often, the men in maroon were able to select their shot without having to concern themselves with a marker trying to get in a block or hook, let alone narrowing the angle.

At the other end of the field, Galway had clearly watched the tapes of Cork’s games with Wexford and Clare. Wing-backs Daithi Burke and Aidan Harte were well supported by Andrew Smith and David Burke dropping back from midfield, which in turn lessened the contributions from Bill Cooper and Patrick Cronin.

Cork were only four down at the half and Galway had also hit nine wides, but when Cork’s Damien Cahalane got a second yellow at the three-quarter stage, the game ran away from Cork, with Galway adding scores as the clock ran down.

It was a long, long 20 minutes for supporters in red and white, Galway hitting 14 wides in that second half to sit alongside their 12-point winning margin. The defeat was at the humiliating end of the spectrum of experiences for Cork fans, particularly when coupled with the footballers’ defeat at the hands of Kildare the previous night.

“We’d probably be disappointed with the number of wides we had,” said Galway boss Anthony Cunningham.

“It’s good to have something to work on for the next day.

“We’ll need, in a closer game, those to go over. We had to weather a storm there after half-time, when Cork came flying back into it but it was always going to be a high-scoring game against Cork.”

Cunningham was being kind to Cork when referring to a storm. Jimmy Barry-Murphy admitted his side were “comprehensively outplayed”, which was a more accurate picture. Though he put his commitment to managing Cork in 2016 on the record yesterday, this is the second year in a row Barry-Murphy’s side have exited the championship with a double-digit hammering.

His football counterpart, Brian Cuthbert, will come under huge pressure to step down after Saturday’s result in Semple Stadium (when did Thurles become Gethsemane for Cork?), despite taking the All-Ireland champions to a replay in the Munster final. Those two defeats, taken in conjunction with what are now annually appalling underage results, meant long faces in the cars heading south last night. The double of 1990 seemed like another century altogether.

Waterford had too much class for Dublin in the opener. For all the talk of systems, they were able to produce individual scores, such as Austin Gleeson’s towering second-half brace from play, while their defence — co-operative and pragmatic — gave away only one goal chance (though Mark Schutte of Dublin converted that expertly).

The game Waterford played is what we have now come to expect, a patient approach before striking through a runner coming through the middle, or delivering to a forward suddenly in space. At one stage, when they were playing the ball across the field in short passes, a colleague called to Kevin Moran for “one more” rather than ballooning it downfield. The new game in sound and vision.

This isn’t the game our fathers watched — it may not be the game we were watching ourselves a few short years ago — but it deserves study. Perhaps a soccer theorist from Buenos Aires would articulate its strong points better than we could.

The sophistication of Derek McGrath’s strategy means it wouldn’t be a surprise if Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid isn’t on the Christmas lists of a few hurling coaches this December. The ability to wait for the opportunity to appear and then to exploit it was seen when Maurice Shanahan picked a Dublin defender’s pocket three minutes into the second half and had the vision to find Shane Bennett, whose goal came directly from the Paul Flynn school of improvised venomous strikes.

The Déise management also deserve credit for using Gleeson as a puck-out option when they needed a bridgehead in the second half.

Their opponents were chasing the game in the second half; before the break, they were getting their key men into the game, with Liam Rushe, Ryan O’Dwyer, and Danny Sutcliffe processing plenty of ball. Against the wind, though, Dublin were put under huge pressure, though there were numerous examples of their workrate, such as a terrific Shane Bennett hook on Peter Kelly which yielded a sideline Gleeson pointed. Shanahan’s fine goal late on enabled their supporters to breathe.

“I think Dublin left a lot of space in the first half and it looked a bit more conventional than it was, just the way Dublin had set up,” said Waterford boss McGrath afterwards. “When you are the first game in a quarter-final double-bill, sometimes it takes until the second-half for the atmosphere to come to life. I think when Shane’s goal went in, the whole thing just took off from there.

“We are just happy to get the win. I was saying in the build-up that Dublin are a serious team and we believe that still, but we have a massive challenge ahead of us.”

True enough. Right now Tipperary and Kilkenny loom in the background, each casting a lengthy shadow, like the gunman in O’Casey’s play.

Galway have that terrible shot selection to work on before facing Tipperary, not to mention Joe Canning’s malfunctioning radar; he hit nine wides alone yesterday.

Waterford have half a century of hurt at the hands of the Black and Amber to shelve in order to treat this as just another game, but their management team will work hard to address that.

Dublin have the football to look forward to. For Cork there’s the slim consolation that they may have bottomed out, and that the only way is up.