O’Neill: Gunners system hard to break down

The scramble for national honours, a second All-Ireland title, will begin again after Christmas but suffice to say for now that Na Piarsaigh’s status as one of the finest Munster club hurling teams of all time is well and truly secured.

It wasn’t just that yesterday’s win continued their record of never having lost a game inside the provincial boundary. It wasn’t even the fact that this latest deposit into the club’s trophy cabinet was the fourth Munster title inside seven short but wonderful years. No, it was the manner of it as much as anything else.

Trailing by a point at the interval, the Limerick side’s fluency was missing and they were being beaten to a succession of 50-50 balls by a Ballygunner side that seemed hell bent on ending a dispiriting run of defeats on Munster’s grandest stage.