Waterford need spring in their step more than others

John Mullane cut a gloomy figure at half-time in Walsh Park last Sunday. John Mullane cut an even gloomier figure at full-time.

A gloomy John Mullane is a tautology. A gloomy John Mullane is a crime against nature.

The cause of his despondency was obvious. The positives for Waterford six days ago? Tom Devine. The negatives? Everything else.

On his return to the fold, Devine performed exactly like he’d been expected to perform. Not quite a one-man wrecking ball, but busy, brisk, and direct.

He forced a sharp save from Eoin Murphy, in the first-half, created Patrick Curran’s point on the resumption, scored a snappy point himself, and had a hand in the penalty.

‘Brought a new dimension’ is one of the most hackneyed phrases in sport, but that’s what Devine did.

As for the negatives, let’s try and contextualise them. It was mid-February, when the prospect of Croke Park in August is as remote as the prospect of Donald Trump doing humility.

The post-All Ireland psychic hangover has not yet dissipated, as is customary with losing teams from counties who seldom reach the final.

The league ceased to have meaning for Derek McGrath as a route to potential silverware after 2016. Waterford were in Cancun only a few weeks ago and the extent to which they looked well-gymmed or even over-gymmed — with Noel Connors resembling a human cube — was a common refrain afterwards.

Kilkenny were the sharper and hungrier proposition, as well they might. And Semple Stadium is this Deise outfit’s natural habitat in a way that Walsh Park, cramped and boggy and whose press-box windows appear not to have been washed since 1996, cannot be.

Yet, one of Waterford’s strengths under McGrath has been the making of statements. Here was an occasion to reach for the loud-hailer, an opportunity to remind the visitors that the worm has turned and just who it was that won both meetings of the sides last year.

“It’s a long time, since you could say that Waterford had an edge over Kilkenny,” Fergal Hartley remarked on WLR FM, prior to throw-in. “Today, we need to hammer that advantage home.”

They never looked like doing anything of the sort, and spent the first-half going through the motions.

For the opening 20 minutes, Maurice Shanahan constituted a one-man attack, until Devine pushed closer to goal. Although the hosts were more expansive in the second-half, because they had to be, the bottom line constituted the latest expression of the old problem.

John McGrath doesn’t have to take the first bus that comes his way, because he knows another will be along in a while, and if he doesn’t take it, then Jason Forde or Seamus Callanan or Bubbles will. Shanahan has to take the first bus, because he knows the next one won’t be along for a while.

In that respect, last Sunday, changed nothing. Instead, it merely underlined that what got Waterford to Croke Park last September will not get them to Croke Park next August.

Derek McGrath faces his last and greatest task: To achieve a greater degree of fluidity within his preferred framework, to freshen the bathwater without losing the baby, to loosen the stays while ensuring the corset doesn’t slip and leave Waterford naked.

It will be hard to get right. It will be very easy to get wrong. If they’re to fail this year, at least let them not fail doing the same thing.

The sweeper no longer being the puzzle for opponents that it was, further grounds for a change in emphasis lie in the prospect of opponents pressing Tadhg De Burca, as Kilkenny did at different stages.

If De Burca may have to readjust to a reduced, luxury diet of time on the sliotar, he should be afforded the basic foodstuff of a ball-winning forward to whom he can go long and early.

And, after all of that, it wouldn’t have taken much for Waterford to have put four goals past Kilkenny. McGrath has two, probably three, more games to unveil a new modus operandi. The presence of Tom Devine gives him a building block.

Tomorrow’s Nowlan Park showpiece. There was a time when neither team could bear the thought of losing it. Not this time.

There was a time when Kilkenny and Tipperary would stand in and whale away at one another, keen to land a blow — however dizzying or otherwise, however temporary or not — ahead of the inevitable championship rematch a few months later.

Not this time. Not since Kilkenny dropped down the weight divisions. Even seemingly permanent sturm und drang has its shelf life.

Tomorrow, the teams will stand off and jab away at each other from a distance, nobody will get hurt and nobody — not even folk from Urlingford and Callan and Mullinahone and Ballingarry — will get overly excited, one way or t’other.

The new championship structure has seen to that, emasculating a fixture that, in previous years, both managers would have targeted from way back.

As per his promise to use his panel to the maximum, Michael Ryan has employed 25 starters in the three outings to date. Brian Cody ditto, coincidentally.

Between the jigs and the reels, Tipperary will be relying on their fifth-choice free-taker to do the needful from placed balls. Is this some kind of record?

We’re scarcely in for a repeat of 2014’s ten-goal affair, when Colin Fennelly and Seamus Callanan hit a hat-trick each. Kilkenny’s tally of one goal in three games says as much, although the absence of John McGrath and Forde will balance the scales somewhat.

The presence of the elder McGrath, the aforementioned fifth-choice free-taker, prompts a thought. Noel had a good goalscoring record, during the opening phase of his inter-county career.

Tomorrow, it would be interesting to see him take on the sliotar and drive forward with it, instead of pulling the strings from deep and being content to pot his point from 50 metres.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that — take your points, etc — but last weekend’s aggregate of 11 green flags in the six fixtures in Divisions 1A and 1B was as disheartening as it was unsurprising.

In any case, effective as Cillian Buckley was against Waterford, he had acres of space in which to act as first-receiver and turn the key in the ignition. McGrath’s task is to remind him that defenders defend. McGrath, by the by, is into his tenth year at the top level.

Never hurried, never less than smooth, he remains one of the sport’s leading stylists and does so despite his personal trauma of two years ago. And he’s still about 19.

What Buckley did at the back, seven days ago, TJ Reid did up-front, knitting Kilkenny’s attack together.

Martin Keoghan has already answered the question about what sector he is best-deployed in, and James Maher looks, at last, to be approaching the form he was showing during the 2016 National League, prior to his unfortunate case of GBH to the knee by a farm gate.

Cody appears wedded to the notion of Padraig Walsh in the number-three jersey; here’s his opportunity to assess the alternatives.

That Tipperary were hanging-on entering injury time, at Semple Stadium last Saturday, said more about Wexford’s rate of improvement, and fitness advantage, than it did about the locals.

But Darragh Mooney’s heroics, combined with Paul Maher’s steadiness in the previous two matches, suggest that any headaches Ryan will have, over settling on Darren Gleeson’s successor, will be of the enviable type.

A fortnight ago, Kilkenny would have approached this fixture with trepidation. No longer. It is not yet another battle in the endless war of the neighbours, but a skirmish to be quickly forgotten.

A verdict? Who knows. What’s more, and much sadder: who will care?