Course theyâre in flying form, they are still well on track to win the All Ireland they were all talking about after beating us in Ennis
2 Likes
Horgan could have sent off Conor Cleary for doing a Tom Condon, which would have given Wexford opportunities to pop over some more wides. He gave Wexford 2 or 3 soft frees during the piece but I didnât think he was too bad.
I addled as to how poor Wexford were today. Davy has a lot to answer for. Wexford, while not being the best team around are much better than their recent results would suggest.
Wexford look less than the sum of their parts.
That is all she wrote.
Commiserations bandage, gran, mac, Fitzy, appendage et al. It was a poor return for your hopes this year.
Chin looked reinvigorated by the move to full forward, but Wexford lacked any kind of plan or cohesion,and there is one person Iâd be looking at after a performance like that.
2 Likes
Galway and Kilkenny must be worst than cork based on the Wexford Kilkenny game
But cork are woeful?
I suppose yerman Lee chin will cut out the auld bullshit he is at now and go back and do a bit of barbering for himself.
Jaysus but a weeks work never fucking harmed anyone. If nothing else it keeps the mind from straying.
1 Like
As Dunphy would say say heâs a COD in effect a professional hurler and was beyond shite yesterday but yet will rake in a nice few quid with his summer camps #charlatan
GAA
Quarter-finals should command spot of their own in schedule
Glorious summer undermined by poorly managed calendar
Denis Walsh
July 15 2018, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
If you remember, the new format for the hurling championship was a second thought. It was an unintended consequence of footballâs difficulty. In hurling, nobody was screaming for change: the provincial championships were vibrant still, the qualifiers invariably produced a couple of humdingers, the hurling quarter-finals were a tasty standing dish and scarcely a season passed without an epic game in August or September. It was an imperfect system, cobbled together by trial and error, but it had a way of working.
The concern was that, come the middle of the summer, hurling would be swamped by footballâs new Super 8s. The solution, in effect, was to create two seasons in one. Hurling was given a terrifically dynamic new early season structure which would dominate the live television schedule and GAA media coverage in general during a period of the year when football was habitually dull.
The happy outcome was that soporific matches from the Ulster football championship were largely banished from our television screens and we werenât exposed to the tedium of Dublin beating up on some defenceless underdog â a staple of the live television schedule in recent years. On top of that a selection of tuppence versus tuppence haâpenny games from the early rounds of the football championship were taken out of our sight to be witnessed only by those who really cared.
In that air space the new provincial hurling championships took flight. The Munster championship was spellbinding, the Leinster championship was more competitive than it had been for ages. The timing was a glorious accident: every team in Munster was capable of beating any of the others. Historically, how often has that been the case? There were a couple of years in the early 2000s when there was a similar evenness of standards and a year or two in late 90s but apart from that Munster had been a multi-tiered championship for more than a century.
To find the last Leinster championship contested by four teams with sustainable ambitions you must scroll back to 1997 when Dublin had a decent team, Wexford had their best team for a generation, Offaly were still in their pomp and Kilkenny were doing their damnedest to keep up. That feeling, though, perished in the early summer of 1998 and nobody could say when it would return.
The irony this summer is that while football commentators agonised about the scarcity of teams of the desired quality to fill out the Super 8s hurling had nine teams fit to take the field against any of the others and be seriously competitive.
In the new calendar this was always going to be the weekend when the balance of attention tipped in footballâs favour. The Super 8s was slated for a gala opening in Croke Park with successive days of double-headers. In the master calendar at the beginning of the year it was unclear how the hurling quarter-finals would be accommodated but that was clarified at the beginning of the week: the hurling games were being fitted in as TV aperitifs.
The long-established Sunday afternoon double-header for quarter-finals in Thurles fell to the pre-eminence of the Super 8s programme in Croke Park. At least the GAA and its television partners had the wit to understand that if the hurling games werenât live on TV there would have been uproar. So, Clare versus Wexford was fixed for 3pm yesterday â a depressant to both TV audience figures and numbers through the turnstiles â effectively pitching it as a curtain-raiser to the double-header in Croke Park last night. The 2pm throw-in for Kilkenny versus Limerick today means that it wonât clash with the World Cup final or Kerry versus Galway in Croke Park, if that takes your fancy, but it has essentially been positioned on the undercard of the afternoonâs sport on TV.
After this weekend the hurling semi-finals will be played on successive days in Croke Park and three weeks later, in mid-August, the inter-county hurling season will be over.
Now, in the thick of it, when everyoneâs blood is up, it feels wrong. It doesnât matter that it was flagged months in advance: the concluding stages of the hurling season are being mismanaged.
At the end of the most glorious summer of hurling imaginable massive promotional opportunities are being thrown away. What kind of crowd would the quarter-final double-header have generated in Thurles today? In excess of 40,000. Would those people have been deterred from travelling because of the football in Croke Park or the soccer in Moscow? Not a chance.
It is not the same audience for football and hurling. Was there uproar in Kildare and Monaghan when it was announced that Kilkenny and Limerick would be shown on a different channel at the same time? No.
The hurling quarter-finals should command a ring-fenced slot: a clear Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon must be found. This is year one of a three-year trial and issues were bound to arise. What is clear already, however, is that the fixtures calendar is not fit for purpose. It is too cramped. Too many good games are being squeezed in the mad rush to get them played. There needed to be a re-balancing of the calendar between club and county but they have gone too far. To delay until year three to fix it would be lunacy.
This is why Cyril Farrell won 3 AIâs and Derek McGrath won none.
A buffer of the highest order
1 Like
No Leinster teams in the last four for the second year in a row. A hurling wasteland.
3 Likes
Limerick v Clare will be some final
the replay below in the GG will be epic
1 Like
The Leinster round robin is so competitive thatâs teams are drained after it, physically and emotionally.
Will there be two pack ticket deals for both semis, is that a done thing
Quite a change this year with semi final near perennials Kilkenny, Tipperary and Waterford all gone and Clare and Limerick making rare appearances at this stage.
1 Like
This is Limerickâs 3rd semi final this decade.
Only turned up in one though 