Can Na Piarsaigh learn from past pains?

Shane O’Neill chuckles at the question. His club, Na Piarsaigh, have been here before, at the All-Ireland semi-final stage. Twice in the last five years, in fact. Isn’t there some solace in having that experience to draw on?

“I don’t know if solace is the word, because we’ve an atrocious record at this level - nought out of two, and probably naive in both of those games, if naive in different ways.

“I was involved in 2011 and our first All-Ireland semi-final, there was the excitement, the novelty, but as a group we probably didn’t give Loughgiel the respect they deserved.

“They were a very good club side, as they showed later in the All-Ireland final. They played very well, though we were very young at the time.

“In 2013 I wasn’t involved and we had a few more young lads on board, and maybe we were naive in comparison with Portumna, who had huge experience in winning at that level - in winning that competition, full stop.

“They showed how good they were. It’s hard to quantify where we’ll be at until we’re on the field and the ball is thrown in.”

It’s almost three months since they played a competitive game, against Thurles Sarsfields in the Munster final. O’Neill and the management team gave them some time off in between:

“Eleven weeks is a long, long time between matches, without a competitive game. We won’t know until today, really, where the boys are at. We gave them December off, effectively. We’ve gone back at it since the first week in January, played a few matches, the usual, but it’s very hard to gauge it when they haven’t played a competitive game. Still, Oulart are in the same boat, obviously.”

That Thurles Sarsfields game came with a tragic backstory. Sars selector Jack Griffin was killed in a car accident before the game was due to be played, and the Tipperary club reached out to O’Neill.

“I got the call directly and I made the decision to agree to postpone the game immediately, subject to the club’s approval, which obviously they gave. We were ready to go and it was only put off by another week.

“We were lucky in Munster in that we had a bit of momentum from the county semi-final onwards it was run off pretty quickly. Up to that we’d struggled to get together as a group because of various things - senior football, inter-county seniors and U21s. That run helped a lot in terms of getting our systems together, fellas playing alongside each other, all of that. But now we’ve had that 11-week lay-off, so we’re starting from scratch again.” With that in mind, does he see any value in the proposal to run the season’s games off in a calendar year?

“When we took over in 2014, the lads had played the All-Ireland semi-final against Portumna,” says O’Neill. “Six weeks later they were off again in the Limerick championship.

“We could see they were mentally tired, and we tried to keep it as fresh as we could, and we got to the county final that year, but when Kilmallock really put it up to us there was no reaction until the closing stages, when we realised we were going to lose our crown. It’s a long, long year for clubs. We would have started the first week of February in 2015, so we’ve gone the full 12 months.

“There’s a broad scheme of things here, with club fixtures and county fixtures, and slotting all of those in. The Limerick County Board have been doing pretty well, running off two or three rounds of the championship in May and June in the last few years, which means everyone’s played two or three games. With the two groups, the new format, that means teams are involved right through to August; the teams know there won’t be championship games in July, but at least they know that, and they’re back in come August.

“Going back a couple of years we had a situation where we were in a county semi-final and we went week to week for nine weeks not knowing when it would be played. At least that’s not happening. People talk about the weather and playing games in bad weather, but you can have bad weather in November that you have in January. We were lucky with the weather in the Munster final, though it was bad for the Sixmilebridge game. Still, you’re in Ireland, what do you expect?” Enough of the generalities; what about today’s specific challenge? O’Neill’s glad they’re playing in Semple Stadium (“I doubt there’s a player on either team who doesn’t have experience of Thurles - their side is peppered with current and former Wexford players, while between club and county I’d say all our lads have played there too. It’s the cathedral for hurling, isn’t it?”).

He’s wary of their opponents, Oulart-The Ballagh, who finally broke through in Leinster last year at the seventh time of asking, having lost four Leinster deciders in a row between 2010 and 2013 alone.

“We played them in September, but that’ll have no bearing - different weather conditions, different line-ups, different stages of our respective competitions. You’d have to take the hat off to them for what they’ve done, what they’ve been through to get their win, particularly with how highly Cuala were rated.

“You could see once they got some momentum, once they won their county title they got three games played in Leinster pretty quickly, which helped.

“Again, they’ve had a lay-off too and they’re probably not too sure where they’re at. We’ll find that out today.”