Seamus Callanan and Tommy O’Connell. The former has been in the news lately. The latter hasn’t, but he too once scored three goals in a big match at Croke Park and still didn’t manage to win. We’ll get back to Tommy in a while.
He retired decades ago, long before the 2015 championship, a summer that began with the playing field looking more level than it had in years and the most open title race since the late 1990s in prospect. In hindsight, that was part of the reason we feel cheated right now. Few disappointments sting more painfully than great expectations frustrated.
Not that that means those high hopes were intrinsically unjustified, not with so many graphs trending upwards. Limerick had taken Kilkenny to the wire amid the apocalyptic monsoon of last year’s All Ireland semi-final. Wexford were a team on the rise. Waterford had come from nowhere, or at any rate from Division 1B, to carry off an improbable National League title. It was only a year and a half since Clare and Cork had contested the All Ireland final, an event that Dublin had very nearly reached. Galway, as ever, appeared capable of just about anything.
Above all there was the undeniable reality that the reigning champions, weakened by the retirements of five serial All Ireland medallists, looked more vulnerable than they had been for a decade. If Kilkenny and Tipperary remained the market leaders, could the pack be more than half a length behind?
Thus Championship 2015 threw in with eight teams harbouring legitimate aspirations of September glory and a ninth – Wexford – perfectly entitled to believe they could reach the last four. And then June 21st arrived. The longest day in more ways than one.
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Limerick hosted Tipperary with every second pundit predicting a home win. Wexford travelled to Kilkenny with absolutely nobody predicting an away win but everybody hoping the visitors would put it up to the locals and thereby demonstrate how far they’d travelled under Liam Dunne.
Kilkenny won by 24 points. Tipperary won by 16 points. The monsters were still roaming the land. The championship never quite recovered.
It was against this backdrop that last week’s Galway/Tipperary game was seized on and, in the first and instantaneous draft of history, anointed a game for the ages. All very understandable. After months of wandering in the desert, here at last was water.
As good as last year’s drawn All Ireland final, though? As good as the Clare/Cork diptych the previous season? As good as the Kilkenny/Tipperary showdowns that made the earth shake in 2009-10?
One shouldn’t complain, particularly not in view of the distressing aridity of a summer whose only high points were the second half of Limerick’s win against Clare and the intellectual if bloodless puzzle that was the Munster final. But last Sunday week was a cracking match without being remotely related to a classic. Nothing wrong with that either.
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The beauty of any match is, of course, decided in the eye of the beholder. No algorithm has yet been created to identify a classic and differentiate it from an encounter that is merely very good. Perhaps that’s just as well; one area of bar-stool argument would be killed stone dead otherwise.
Some essentials must obtain, however. Two good teams playing to form; some goals but not too many; never more than a couple of points between the sides; and the issue in the balance until the closing few minutes (and all the better if it’s not settled until two and a half minutes into injury time).
Judged on those criteria, the second All Ireland semi-final was hugely entertaining stuff but no classic, still less an epic. (Think of it this way: would the match still have been accorded so many garlands had Tipperary held on to win?)
It didn’t have the sustained deployment of skills at warp speed or absence of errors that last September’s drawn game did. It didn’t have the delightful sherbet fizz of Clare and Cork, twice, in 2013. It didn’t have the rare beef, blood metaphorically dripping, of Kilkenny and Tipperary in 2009-10. Last Sunday week one team hurled really well and the other team were distinctly mediocre, their full-forward apart.
Again, what of it? Sometimes the only option is to switch off one’s critical faculties, strap in and enjoy the ride. Ten years ago, for instance, Galway and Kilkenny shared nine goals in an All Ireland semi-final. It was the most fantastic madcap fun, compelling because it featured the kind of defending that would have given Alan Hansen a hernia. For that reason it wasn’t and couldn’t have been a classic. But nobody wrote to Croke Park next day complaining about lack of value for money.
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Or to reach back through the mists of time, Kilkenny and Waterford produced two All Irelands finals in the space of three years in the late 1950s that were deemed on the spot to be classics. The 1957 collision ended with Kilkenny winning with a last-minute point, 4-10 to 3-12. Now look at the scoreline when the sides met again two years later: Waterford 1-17 Kilkenny 5-5.
Was it a thriller? With Waterford scoring a deflected late goal to snatch a draw it surely was. Was it a classic? With one team hitting nearly twice as many scores as the other it surely wasn’t. “Waterford were the better team, of course they were,” recalls Tommy O’Connell, the teenage corner-forward who scored a hat trick for Kilkenny. “We got the goals and that kept us in the game.”
Sound vaguely familiar? Sound not altogether unlike last Sunday week, when Seamus Callanan was the twentysomething full-forward who got the goals that kept Tipperary in the game?
No classic but a copper-bottomed, edge of the seat thriller in a season of dull domestic non-dramas. Callanan and his colleagues from both counties are in our debt forever.