Martys intro will be ICONIC.
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Surely some derivative of “Tony Kelly of course is from Ballyea, they don’t normally make hurlers out there” “Ballyea a hurling outpost” etc
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There was 3 Boylans on the greatest ever Midleton team, brothers I assume?
If he played in the 80s he might have one wan in 86. If he played in the 90s he’d have won fuck all.
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Looks like he won a couple of county titles with them in the 80s but wasn’t part of the All Ireland winning club team of 87-88.
Not sure if he was with them in 1986 or only after that
Is he anything to the Morans out of Ahane?
From Ennis to Islamabad, from Kilmallock to Timbuktu, they’ll be watching this Munster Hurling Final.
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He might be their doctor. I’m not quiet sure…
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Whats this now?
“People are watching from Ennis to Estonia from Patrickswell to Peru. This is Munster final day. This is special.This is tradition……” and so on for a few minutes, I might record it
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Lol
Hi to Moira who is watching in an Irish bar in Buenos Aires
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He was asking about coffee.
I’d take Marty’s intro and shite any day over that Canning lug and his talk of latitude and telling us that Tony Kelly has scored his 187th ever championship point
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Ger loves “an enterprising ball”
I didn’t rate Clare overly highly at the start of the championship but they’ve grown on me. That was some hammering they dished out to Waterford without 6 or 7 starters. Limerick certainly won’t beat them by 25 points. 5 points or so far more likely. Kelly, Duggan and SOD will really test that Limerick rearguard.
It would be a great championship without Limerick. You couldn’t pick a winner with any certainty from the rest. Although Clare do look No.2 in the country on recent form.
Very much like 2007/08 when Kilkenny were in their pomp and there was a sense of inevitability about the outcome after 5 minutes of the All-Ireland final. I’m sure someone will emerge in the next couple of years to really challenge Limerick. Probably a young Cork team under new management.
Both hurling and Gaelic football carry the curse where tactical innovation tends to make the game more boring rather than exciting.
Rugby carries this curse as well but association football does not.
Both GAA sports were essentially based on the premise of being a war of 15 men against 15, where there were 15 individual battles and each pair of protagonists didn’t stray that much outside their “patch”.
Tactics were non-existent, strategy was non-existent except to drive the ball as far and usually as high as possible. The ethos of the game was “heroism”. Heroic style was prioritised, which in hurling meant pulling on the ball, particularly overhead pulling, was prized. In Gaelic football it was high catching at midfield which was prized as being “stylish” and heroic.
At its best that made for compelling contests, but it was tactically dumb as shit.
Fitness also dictated this. In the old days the players were not very fit which by definition meant the ball had to travel, not the players.
There was a sort of sweet spot for probably two or three decades where fitness had evolved to a certain point but tactics hadn’t. That was probably somewhere in the 1970s to somewhere in the late 1990s/maybe early 2000s.
Those decades contained some of the most thrilling, probably the most thrilling games of all time because you had players who were very fit, combined with high skill levels, but dumb tactics. Great games were gloriously chaotic. Examples of this would be most Cork v Tipperary games between 1984 and 1991, Cork v Galway 1990, Galway v Tipperary 1987.
But the flip side of that is that there were many games which were of a poxy standard.
Football from about 1991 on saw similarly thrilling contests where fitness had evolved, skill was at a good level, but tactics weren’t a massive factor. But jaysus it made for thrilling spectacle at its best. The second half of the Down-Meath final of 1991 and the second match between Meath and Kildare in 1997 were probably the apex of this. But again, one could look at say, Dublin v Meath 1991, a saga which has taken on mythical status, and consider that much or even most of the football throughout those four games was poor to say the least.
Tactics started to become a genuine factor in terms of seriously changing how both games were played in the late 90s and early 2000s, with hurling becoming very focussed on percentages, ie. possession and making the correct decisions on the ball, which meant the amount of goals started to diminish, because goals were rarely a percentage play. Cork brought their short game and scores of 0-22 and the like, which had previously been unheard of, became common.
This was enabled by superior fitness and strength, probably a lighter, springier ball, and hurleys with bigger sized bosses than before.
So pulling died out, tippy tappy to hands became the norm, and the idea of hurling as a war of 15 individual battles started to die out. Compulsory helmets meant the players became much less recognisable.
Some would say much was gained by that transition, but much was lost too. As I said, hurling and Gaelic football have traditionally been contests where spectators essentially want matches to be wars made up of 15 individual battles.
In hurling, because the ball can move quicker, you probably still get more of that old style chaos than in Gaelic football, but I have a good degree of sympathy with the view that the evolution to puckout > pass to hand > shot from distance formula where 0-30 plays 1-28 or some such can be quite clinical and quite boring, especially when it happens often, which it now does.
In football in the 2000s Tyrone brought the idea of swarm defence and then Jim McGuinness went, well, full McGuinness.
The lack of an offside rule and the lower speed with which the ball moves compared to hurling means Gaelic football always carried the risk of descending towards a basketball style defensive system where the entire team gets inside their own 45.
To do that required an insane level of fitness because it meant players had to run a hell of a lot than before. Playing against such a system became a grind.
It all added up to a situation where professional preparation became essential to compete and counties with big squads and inherent advantages in terms of population, geography in terms of the jobs market (in an amateur sport) had massive advantages.
At Gaelic football’s top end, the matches between Dublin, Kerry, Mayo and Donegal in the 2010s, especially after Mayo started to crack the McGuinness code in 2013 and the game became more about individual battles again, are surely the best matches of all time. But too few other teams can compete at anywhere near that level.
The more scientific way of playing the game and preparing meant gaps between the strong and the weak became more yawning than ever before.
Because hurling does not have one county which has massively inherent structural advantages over the rest in the way Dublin do in football (Cork would be the closest equivalent because they have the biggest population and a major urban centre, but it’s far from a perfect comparison), the eight or nine counties which take the game seriously can in general be expected to compete with each other on a more even level. Kilkenny, the one team which seemed to have hit on a formula for eternal dominance, has less than 100k people, and thus by definition did not.
Limerick are now approaching Kilkenny levels of dominance. But if some team can challenge them at their peak in the way that Tipperary did to Kilkenny in 2009 and 2010 and the way Mayo did to Dublin particularly from 2015-2017, you’ll get something which will have a serious claim to be the best game of all time. It’ll be different in style to the days of chaos but equally as compelling.
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