It’s about keeping recovery going for Waterford

Admit it. You weren’t expecting Waterford to have begun the season with such a flourish. You weren’t expecting them to be two from two. You might not have been expecting them to struggle, to be instantly mired in Second Season Syndrome, but you surely weren’t anticipating that they’d do a job on the All-Ireland champions at Walsh Park, then travel to Páirc Uí Rinn and breeze past the hosts.

C’mon, admit it. You know you want to. As for that Derek McGrath lad, he may be surprising you as well. Feel free to admit that too.

But be sure of this much. Whether the defending NHL champions had begun with two wins or two defeats, McGrath would have treated them just like Kipling’s masquerading duo. For here’s a man who’s playing the long game. There are things he’s trying to achieve and there are things he’s not achieved — not just yet anyway.

Among the things he’s attempting to do are to create a pervasive, enduring culture and build a spirit that will not be broken. Real Cody stuff. Among the things he’s not attempting to do is to win the All-Ireland this year: not that he’s not trying to win the All- Ireland this year, obviously, but rather that the objective for 2016 is exponential progress. Two steps forward last season, one step forward this season. Keep her lit. Keep the recovery going. (Ahem.)

Think of it as one of those command-and-conquer games. Last year McGrath built his little compound with its blockhouse and palisades. This year he aims to extend his holding by venturing into the wilderness and taking on whatever wild beasts or Indians or Cork folk lurk there. Creeping colonisation. Nice and steady. Nothing too dramatic. Festina lente.

Pundits who blithely urge McGrath to cast off the shackles and strive for world domination miss the point entirely. Here is not some Voldemort of the defensive arts who, blessed with a forward line of Messi, Suarez, Neymar, and Maurice Shanahan, perversely refuses to allow them stray beyond the halfway line. McGrath cuts his cloth in line with the quality and quantity of fabric available to him. This material is neither amazing nor technicoloured.

Let’s remember what he hasn’t before we survey what he has. Scroll back nine years, to when the Déise were at their absolute rollicking, badge-kissing, goalscoring, singing, and dancing apogee. The sweep and verve of Ken McGrath, the power hitting of Eoin Kelly and Paul Flynn, the craft and craftiness of Tony Browne, the speed and accuracy of John Mullane, the honest toil of Seamus Prendergast, the irrepressibility of Big Dan. The attitude of them and the heads on ‘em.

Now look at the resources available to the manager today. Kevin Moran is a former wing-back, Michael Walsh a former centre-back. Paraic Mahony, his attack leader, has been gone for nearly a year. Maurice Shanahan, Mahony’s replacement, has endured well-publicised personal problems. Patrick Curran and the Bennetts are teenagers.

Pick a combined Best of Waterford 2007/Best of Waterford 2016 and of the current lot only Moran, an older Walsh, Noel Connors, Austin Gleeson, Tadhg De Burca, and perhaps Shanahan would make it. Now please give Derek McGrath some sort of high couture award for the garment he’s created with the material at his disposal.

And here’s another brownie point for him. The collective lack of histrionics. “No negative body language,” is one of his mantras. Hence the absence of drooping heads and shaken fists when Waterford are doing badly and the lack of crest-clutching when they’re scoring. None of that tiresome emotional baroque.

One small qualm has arisen from their two outings to date. Two games, no goals. While we’ve long argued here that, contrary to the received wisdom, it’s points rather than goals “that win games”, man cannot live by bread alone. Sooner or later Waterford need to be creating goal chances. Good goal chances. At the moment, they create half-chances.

Remember Colin Dunford coming in from the right at the Killinan End in the Munster final and releasing an angled effort — necessarily angled, because he was at an angle — that Darren Gleeson spooned out for a 65’? Remember Patrick Curran coming in from a similar angle against Cork a fortnight ago, and releasing a similar effort that Anthony Nash batted away to safety?

Manfully and effectively as Maurice Shanahan has led the line in Mahony’s absence, he requires a foil; the supply lines are too stretched otherwise. Patrick Curran, fast and low to the ground and blessed with an eye for goal, may be that sidekick. Because Shanahan needs a man permanently stationed within 15 metres of him and Waterford will need at least a goal a game, every game, come summer. (Kilkenny’s average output in the past two championships, their demolitions of Offaly and Wexford aside: 2-20 in 2014 and 1-23 in 2015. Clare’s average output in the 2012 All-Ireland series: 1-23.)

A word on Austin Gleeson, clearly the most gifted of the new crop. In so many ways he’s a clone of Ken McGrath. Not as good in the air, admittedly, but same club, same attitude, same versatility, same indefinable quality that makes watching him a pleasure. He also — so far, at any rate — shares with Ken a certain lack of cold-blooded calculation.

Against Kilkenny on Valentine’s Day, the ploy of having Gleeson steam through from deep to take an offload in the middle of the field worked to an extent (he got off eight attempts on goal), but only to an extent (seven of them went wide). It was an imaginative gambit, an understandable one; Gleeson, after all, was the man who did more than any other to rouse Waterford from their torpor after half-time against Dublin in last year’s All Ireland quarter-final.

Yet here’s something for McGrath to contemplate, and knowing him, he already has. Is this particular gambit potentially and implicitly self-defeating, by putting pressure on Gleeson to do something remarkable every time he hits the line and takes possession? Put another way, does he feel obliged to do a Steven Gerrard on it and opt for the Hollywood ball instead of pausing, surveying his options and spraying a 10-metre pass to a colleague in space?

Therein lies another challenge for McGrath, to strike a balance by making ample use of Gleeson’s absurd talent but not flogging it to death. Finding this happy medium may take another season or two.

Tipperary? They didn’t perform badly at Nowlan Park — far from it, and it’s easy to forget Tipp were missing Seamus Callanan — but sometimes the performance matters less than the outcome. This, given the identity of the opposition and the venue, was one of those times. The Temple of Doom gets ever doomier.

Of course there were might have beens, the biggest of them being the identity of the man left to pull the trigger straight in front of goal 10 minutes into the second half. Patrick Maher. Anyone else and Tipp were four points up with the wind in their sails.

Talking of P Mahers, Padraic’s list of solecisms — of which there were too many to mention a fortnight ago, the most culpable being not so much the height of his tackle on TJ Reid as the inexplicable urge to dive in on an opponent tracking away from goal and no immediate danger — dates back to the first half of last year’s Munster final. One imagines Michael Ryan has had a quiet, or not so quiet, word in his ear in the meantime.

Maher can do better, and surely will. Cathal McAllister, who ought to have learned a lesson after the 2012 All Ireland semi-final, can do better and has to.