La Touche Cosgrave not buying Tooreen's underdog tag 

FAVOURITES: Andrew La Touche Cosgrave of Monaleen, Limerick, pictured ahead of the AIB GAA All-Ireland Hurling Intermediate Club Championship Final. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

Andrew La Touche Cosgrave is talking about the last time he played in Croke Park.

"I was on the extended Limerick panel when we lost to Kilkenny in 2019, but my last time actually playing there was the All-Ireland minor final (of 2014) when we lost to Kilkenny again - always Kilkenny," he sighs.

It is an ironic sigh because for pretty much everyone else in the hurling world these days they're saying the same thing about Limerick - always Limerick.

The county has claimed four of the last five All-Ireland senior titles with La Touche Cosgrave graduating from the underage ranks to be part of the panel for their breakthrough senior win in 2018.

And here is a Limerick side again today at GAA headquarters, Monaleen, for the AIB All-Ireland intermediate club final. That they are playing the champions of Mayo - albeit the senior champions - Tooreen, only increases the apparent sense of inevitability about it.

Even La Touche Cosgrave admits that it's 'a strange one, a Limerick-Mayo final, I don't think you'll ever hear of it again, I'd say'.

But he stops himself there in case it sounds like he is taking the outcome for granted.

"You'd have people that come up to you telling you, 'Oh sure it's a Mayo crowd', but that's not really the case, we're playing the Mayo senior champions," he says. "Most of their players are on the Mayo senior hurling team. Just because they aren't competing in the Liam MacCarthy, that doesn't mean that they're not doing the same training as the Limerick senior hurlers.

"I wouldn't have experience of playing against any of them but I'd have heard of a few of their players alright. I was chatting to a fella the other day who said a few of them were hurling in the Fitz with UL, which is almost a better standard than county."

He makes a compelling case but Monaleen will be favourites and that will be that. They may be playing a side that has won five of the last six senior titles in their county but Monaleen were a regular senior team themselves until relegation in 2021.

In a shortened campaign due to the pandemic, they lost a couple of group games, then a relegation final narrowly to Blackrock and suddenly found themselves in the intermediate ranks. In 2022, they topped their group in the championship, took out Effin and Bruff in the knock-out stages and were immediately a senior team again.

They might well wonder now if relegation wasn't a good thing, given the memorable journey they've since gone on with a particularly young team.

"It's been a great year for us," admits La Touche Cosgrave. "With no one on the (Limerick) senior panel, it can be a positive because we're all working off the same hymn sheet, we have no one away."

At 26, La Touche Cosgrave has time on his side to reignite his own inter-county career. If it doesn't happen, he still has an incredible story to tell; involved in All-Ireland minor, U-21 and senior finals before he'd even turned 22. He came on in the 2015 and 2017 U-21 final wins, and picked up a senior medal in 2018, though the minor final of 2014 ended in defeat.

"The older you get, the more that drives home," he says of the minor loss to Kilkenny when he lined out at centre-back in a team that included Cian Lynch, Sean Finn, Seamus Flanagan, Peter Casey and Tom Morrissey. "I was thinking in my head, 'I nearly have everything bar that'. And I can't go back and get that one."

Injuries have been a constant problem for La Touche Cosgrave, a Dublin based carpenter, more recently. "I had bad tendonitis in my Achilles for years," he says. "It kind of came to a head when I started the trade coming up on two years ago this summer, it got to a stage where I couldn't walk. I said I had to get something done because I couldn't train properly."

So he had surgery last year and while he 'missed the majority of the hurling' season, he is fully fit and firing again. A 2.0 version who, stationed in attack, helped himself to a goal and a point against Bray Emmets in the All-Ireland semi-final win.

He is thankful for the help of manager Eoin Brislane. Monaleen hadn't actually got a manager when they began training for the 2022 season but Tipp man Brislane was eventually appointed and when he heard of La Touche Cosgrave's situation, 'he got on to the best people and got it sorted'.

An All-Ireland club medal would be a nice pay off for all that combined effort.

"Everything is going so quickly," says La Touche Cosgrave. "It'll all hit home when it's finished I suppose and hopefully we'll have the result we want."