Enda McEvoy: Cork and Kilkenny won't have to overthink this one

HIGH AND MIGHTY: Cork’s Conor Lehane and Kilkenny’s Michael Carey. Picture: INPHO/Ken Sutton

Readers in search of a contender for the dullest second paragraph in the history of sportswriting have come to the right place. Strap in.

Kilkenny open their championship campaign on April 22nd. Limerick open theirs on April 23rd. Tipperary open theirs on April 23rd. Cork open theirs on April 30th.

There. Intoxicating stuff, huh? The shades of Red Smith and Hugh McIlvanney must be wondering where they went so horribly wrong in the profession.

You’ll get the context. All four teams can afford to give it the holly this weekend. No handwringing. No nonsense about how the poor dears might be flahed out for their provincial campaigns. This, as we never tire of pointing out, is 2023, not 1973.

Fair enough, reach the final and the winners of Limerick/Tipp will have a decision to make about how firmly to apply foot to pedal. But not till then and certainly not tonight.

Here’s a forecast. Sooner or later the curious case of Waterford 2022 will come to be seen as an outlier. Sooner or later a team will win the league and proceed to thrive in the championship and the new received wisdom about the damaging effects of the secondary competition will go out with the washing.

Liam Cahill mentioned lately about how he “got it wrong” last season. It would be enlightening to hear him elaborate about the actual moment or moments when he did so. Overdoing it in springtime or unnecessarily upping the ante during the championship, specifically prior to the Cork game?

Anyway. Nowlan Park tomorrow is scarcely a dry run for the All-Ireland final, not that it may not prove a way station along the road to the 2024 decider for one side or the other. But the fact it’ll be an achievement if either make Croke Park on July 23rd under their first-season manager helps render the encounter sublimely free of summer implications.

They won’t have to overthink tomorrow. They won’t have to think much at all. There won’t be spare defenders to bypass or tactical puzzles to decipher. It is the ideal semi-final for both. Kilkenny will allow Cork to hurl in a way that Limerick would not; Cork will not discomfit Kilkenny with the same physical heft Limerick or Galway would.

The upshot will not be champagne hurling of the kind legend informs us Cork and Kilkenny used to produce but at worst ought to be the equivalent of high-class prosecco, fizzy and easy on the palate without being sweet or sickly.

On which point, the pair still owe the hurling public for their 1999-2006 MacCarthy Cup quartet. Four games, four goals. The Milan clubs of the 1960s would have loved it. Nowlan Park would be a good place to start the repayment scheme.

One item per team to keep an eye out for.

Cork when they’re defending to get a sufficiency of bodies around the man in possession. Their persistent failing for the past five years.

Kilkenny when they’re attacking to use incisive diagonals – and overuse of diagonals is an occupational hazard that comes with the territory when a team’s attacking game is being rewired - instead of the Hail Mary ball. Their persistent failing for the past five years.

The heavy weather they made of it last Sunday, on a rotten afternoon when Waterford were set up to stymie, can be excused. In the circumstances, the only surprise would have been if the hosts, in their fifth league outing under Derek Lyng and missing the players they were, had not struggled.

As for the visitors, Pat Ryan has made goalscoring a virtue and against Wexford a few weeks ago Padraig Power contrived the kind of improbable close-range effort, unbeautiful but effective, that Cork spent the 1970s and ‘80s scoring, largely through the intercession of Jimmy and Leary and Charlie McCarthy. It may have been a straw in the wind. It may have been nothing of the sort, not least because the hurling of the 2020s conduces against the poacher’s goal.

The absence of Seamus Harnedy, the county’s second-most important player of the past ten years, is compounded by the premium the conditions will place on ballwinning. But such evidence as 2023 has so far presented indicates that Cork are a little farther down the road than Kilkenny (especially and understandably a TJ-less Kilkenny), are likelier to rack up a winning return on a given day, especially in a contest played on their terms, and possess more of a goal threat.

All of which should be enough to propel them over the line. Provided they want it to.

***

In the lifetime of every aspiring bunch there comes a day in springtime that brings not so much a match as a podium. They’ve a statement to make. To their opponents, and all the better if the latter are a statement team themselves. To the outside world. Most of all to themselves.

This is us. This is what we can do, this is what we’re trying to do and this is what some day we’ll do even better. 

It is not a Dare Not Lose fixture – that will arrive later on their journey – but rather a Need to Win game.

Thus Tipperary in Liam Sheedy’s first coming in 2008 when they beat Kilkenny by 1-15 to 1-10 in a now largely forgotten National League semi-final at Nowlan Park. It was the start of something and quite something it was too.

They went on to win the league; they went from there to winning Munster; the following year they almost won the All-Ireland; the year after that they did win the All-Ireland. (The Dare Not Lose fixture was the 2010 quarter-final against Galway.) Thus Tipperary again tonight in Liam Cahill’s first coming. Maybe.

They’ve been averaging 29 scores per match, commendable going for springtime, and it is safe to observe that when Darren Gleeson declared in Corrigan Park last Sunday that he was impressed with “how they ran the ball, how they pressed the ball, they set a high intensity” he wasn’t being polite about his fellow countymen merely for the sake of it.

Given that unorthodox personnel formations were in vogue among Tipp folk over the winter, one half-expected Liam Cahill to deploy the much discussed throuple midfield during the league. Instead, disappointingly, he’s stuck with his Waterford formula. Bodies over the ball, dig out possession, put the head down and don’t dream of settling for the handy point.

That Cahill is betting the farm on gross domestic green flag production prompts a small long-term qualm. Come the day that for whatever reason the goals don’t arrive (bad luck, bad shooting, a failure to quarry enough clean middle-third possession to run with, the brilliance of Nickie Quaid or whoever), will his charges register enough points to compensate? Okay, it’s a long-term qualm.

Running a non-trier is out of the question tonight. Tipp need to be competitive and they will be. They don’t have to win – that might bring its own problems in two months’ time - but they cannot allow themselves to lose by more than four or five points.

Limerick are farther down the road for the season than they were 12 months ago. Makes sense. Winning formulas may not be for changing but the bells and whistles have to be adjusted to ensure freshness.

Whereas tomorrow John Keenan can throw in the ball, step back and admire, when Liam Gordon throws in the ball tonight he’ll be well advised to take immediate evasive action as the participants get dug out of one another. Tipperary’s need to impose themselves is no greater and no less than Limerick’s need to keep their boot on the Premier head. And a point stressed here before that can never be stressed often enough or firmly enough: Tipp are the last lads to be giving ideas to.

Two early goals for the visitors would stir the pot nicely. A response for Limerick can be taken as read. What Tipp then manage to summon by way of a counter counter-strike would make for fascinating viewing. As would the efforts of Noel McGrath and Cian Lynch to produce light amid the heat.

The All-Ireland champions are on war footing, have home advantage and are not in the habit of giving opponents an even break. That’ll do.