YOUR heart didn’t need to be stuck in the outcome to share the romance, the spectacle, the snakes-and-ladders narrative, the sight after sight of did-you-see-that? brilliance. With a really good hurling match the acclaim reaches a crescendo long before the final whistle and the first response is always vulnerable to inflation. The test is to watch it again at room temperature, filtered of the feeling that made your blood pump in the first place. In that simple process this match shines.
But there are always other ways to see it. You wonder what Brian Cody saw. His Kilkenny team have played a handful of classic matches since the turn of the century, no more than that; most of the time they were too good to be bogged down in thrillers. Count them: against Galway in 2005 and possibly 2007 (for an hour); against Tipperary in 2009, 2010, 2014 and arguably 2002; against Limerick in 2014.
But he was sceptical about the fizzy All-Irelands that Cork and Clare produced in 2013 that the rest of us were happy to accept as champagne; and he wasn’t convinced about the mesmerising drawn All-Ireland last September either. To his taste, it lacked fibre.
There is a brutality to winning that Cody mastered long ago. Beyond the obvious he will have seen stuff in Galway’s performance last week that should concern them. Over the years too many of Kilkenny’s rivals failed to see themselves as Cody did. He doesn’t give clues.
The aggression, the athleticism, the relentless tackling, the hard-headed refusal to quit that characterised Galway’s performance last Sunday reappeared for the first time since the 2012 Leinster final; over the past three years their performances had drifted further and further from that ideal. But none of those elements, not even in those quantities, will give them an advantage in a fortnight; reaching the level they achieved last Sunday will only get them to the start line.
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What changed since they stood up to Kilkenny as putative equals in the summer of 2012? For one thing their conditioning dropped. Anthony Cunningham’s reputation was founded on his teams being hard fit. When he took over the Galway under-21s, for example, they gathered for core work in the gym in November, fully 10 months before they would appear in the championship.
At the end of 2012, however, Galway lost their strength and conditioning guy; at the end of 2013 his replacement was replaced. By the end of last summer, after their final-quarter collapse against Tipp in Thurles, Cunningham knew they weren’t fit enough.
In mitigation it was their third championship match in 13 days, having had a draw and replay against Kilkenny, but there was more to it than that. In his post-match interview that evening he spoke about David Burke and Andy Smith blowing hard at half time in the dressing room and of Cathal Mannion cramping up. That was unsustainable.
So they resumed in the gym in November with a different attitude and a more punishing schedule. The payoff came on Sunday. Freeze the match at the moment Noel McGrath put Tipperary a point in front with 69:15 on the clock. In the time that remained Galway swamped them: they made 21 plays to Tipperary’s 11 and created four scoring chances to Tipperary’s none. Only one Tipperary forward, Lar Corbett, won possession after Tipp took the lead for the last time and he was blocked down in front of the Cusack Stand, harassed and going nowhere.
For Galway to have the energy and strength to blitz their opponents at the end of a breathless match reflected how far they had come and how far they had fallen behind.
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The absence of sweepers last Sunday was a source of general rejoicing. In the brutal business of winning and losing, though, Galway have some decisions to make before the final. Last Sunday, Galway gambled on getting their match-ups right and putting savage stress on the supply lines. They gang-tackled the Tipperary half-back line and centre-field especially, operating in little cells, like Kilkenny do.
Damien Young is Tipp’s video analyst and he also does their in-game stats. He flagged the issues at half-time: they were being screwed on turnovers and strangled in the half-back-line. In the second half, though, neither of those issues was resolved.
Set aside for a minute Padraig Mannion’s inability to cope with Seamus Callanan, Galway’s failure to compress the space in front of him and their evident belief that they didn’t have an alternative to Mannion; for all the pressure that Galway put on the ball out the field Callanan still sourced his possession from 11 different Tipperary players. Somehow, they still got him the ball.
Callanan is a special player but in TJ Reid and Richie Hogan Kilkenny have two players with an equivalent capacity to destroy and another couple of deadly snipers. Can Galway afford to go one-on-one again and depend on killing the ball in the launch areas?
Think back to 2012: Tony Og Regan played centre back with Iarla Tannian riding shotgun; Kevin Hynes played full-back with Johnny Coen sweeping around him. They didn’t play with a sweeper as such but there was planned support and extra security. On the whole, Galway’s defence might be better now but Kilkenny will see Tannian as a point of access at six and even in this age of rotating forward lines and pre-ordained match-ups, somebody must play full-back.
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Hynes was an improvised solution in 2012 that worked until Hogan torched him in the All-Ireland final replay; he’s still on the training panel but can’t make the match-day squad. Ronan Burke, a young player, was given the shirt last year but he’s marooned on the training panel now as well, outside the 26. John Hanbury wears three but they’re not convinced about him as a full-back. The point, though, is that whoever ends up there won’t be able to live with the kind of holed protection Mannion was forced to suffer last Sunday.
Playing Russian roulette with Kilkenny is different. No matter how many times you spin the chamber of the gun it stops at a bullet.