Sa[quote=“Horsebox, post: 806338, member: 1537”]He won’t have an AI medal-that will be the asterix, nothing to do with not beating Kilkenny in c’ship which I assume you mean now.[/quote]
Same thing really
Mullane never said he contacted the Waterford Management though? He was waiting on a ‘call’ from them…
If he had withdrawal symptoms that strong he should have contacted them himself.
[quote=“Kinvara’s Passion, post: 806351, member: 686”]Mullane never said he contacted the Waterford Management though? He was waiting on a ‘call’ from them…
If he had withdrawal symptoms that strong he should have contacted them himself.[/quote]
There’s a bit of history between himself and Ryan.
Most KK fans i know like Mullane, esp after 2008. He kept up the fight for the whole game and was the only Waterford player to stay on the pitch for the presentation of the cup.
I seem to recall right at the death of that final Mullane getting the sliothar in hand, turning and facing a wall of Kilkenny players ready to kill him to get the ball back. I think he might have said something in an interview afterwards about them being 27 points up and still being that hungry for the ball. He seemed to be the only one who hadn’t had the stuffing completely knocked out of him.
Mullane was doing the very best he possibly could v KK, TV pictures clearly showed that
On the Line: Donal Óg Cusack on Hurling
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Just a few weeks ago I was sitting up in the Cooley Mountains wondering about the oddness of a world where you could spend a career being abused for your short puck-outs and then drive the length of the country to compete in a Poc Fada competition run over hill and mountain tracing in the footsteps of the warrior Setanta as he made his way to Co. Meath.
Dalo was devouring Seanie McGrath like a python eating a rabbit in a David Attenborough film. As poor Seánie’s little bobtail disappeared down Dalo’s gullet, Dalo waved a fist at the camera and a fist to the crowd.
A Clare fella came out of nowhere and sat down beside me. The usual old chat. Who’s going to win the All Ireland?
I said what I thought. That with Kilkenny gone it was anybody’s championship. He looked at me and said,
“You know of course who is our biggest problem. Your man.”
When you hear that from a Clare fella it can only be Davy Fitz they are talking about.
I said back, and I meant it, that I think Davy is a great asset. To Clare, the game and our Association. The GAA needs characters. Hurling needs characters. I love the way his team plays. He has a new system, a new style and it shows years of thought and imagination.
“Yeah but look at him on the line,” said my friend. “The carry on. Compare him to ye’re man."
We will compare them. That’s one of the reasons that makes this final so worth looking forward to. Cork played lovely hurling, especially in their semi-final. Clare play lovely hurling. Will somebody blink? Will somebody lose their nerve?
Jimmy Barry-Murphy must smile to himself at the irony of things. Here he is doing again what he did in 1999 but this time the opposition is more like the 1999 version of Cork than even Cork are. Precocious, with a lot of underage success behind them and probably afraid of nothing.
In 1999, September was bonus territory for us. It should be the same this year for Cork but the season has been so magical that the sense of expectation in Cork is massive. How Jimmy handles things and how Davy handles things for the next few weeks will be brilliant to watch.
Clare, like Cork, are ahead of their own development curve. The key to Clare’s game is that it is fluid. It changes when it needs to. Podge Collins gets called away to perform some other task and another man has the intelligence to fill in. They are like that everywhere. Their style is like a river making its way through mountains. Fast and shallow when it needs to be, quiet and deep when necessary. It makes its way through the path that will get it to the sea.
Clare’s style takes many forms and it is constantly changing. Not unlike their manager. Davy has mellowed into a quiet enough presence now, compared to the full harvest moon version who lit up the hurling world back in the 1990s. It had to be so. He has reined himself in and produced a team worth paying good money to watch.
If you judged books by their covers you wouldn’t have thought that a graduate of the Loughnane school would have come up with something so subtle. I remember back in the early days when I joined the senior panel with Cork when we started playing the old team there was almost a sense of fear of Clare in our dressing room. They had such an aura about them. They hammered us a couple of times. We came away wondering would we ever match what they had.
A couple of years later in 1999, I remember a fella from Castlemartyr came up to me as I was coming out of training on the Thursday night. We were playing Clare on the Sunday. The Castlemartyr man asked me had I any tickets going. I hadn’t and I commented to him that they were fierce hard to come by, that he may have left it late. He said to me, ‘to be honest it isn’t ye I want to go and see at all. I want to see Clare like.’
I thought to myself that maybe he should see how he’d get on looking for tickets above in Ennis if he loved them so much, but I could see his point. They were an awesome team. The most shy and retiring of their defence was Seánie McMahon and I rated him so highly that one of my prize possessions is the jersey he swapped with me after his last-ever Munster game.
We got over them in the end though on that Sunday. We did it through nerve and a lot of that nerve came, in fairness, from Mark Landers. Mark and me would have our differences down the years but he had carraigs on him that you could see from the moon. He had great confidence and didn’t fear anybody and in the end that rubbed off on us.
He organised a video for us in 1999 of Anthony Daly. We were in Dundrum House, the usual hotel in Tipp, before the game when Landers stuck his movie on. ‘Dalo’ was devouring Seánie McGrath like a python eating a rabbit in a David Attenborough film. As poor Seánie’s little bobtail disappeared down Dalo’s gullet, Dalo waved a fist at the camera and a fist to the crowd.
That got to us. Dalo was on the way to matching Christy Ring’s record of captaining three All-Ireland winning teams. That got to us as well. That made it the day we stood up to Clare. From the parade to the final whistle we waged war on them.
And the strange thing which we realised afterwards was that when we stopped and thought about it, we almost expected to win it. Our sense of entitlement came back. We’d won two minor Munster titles and three U21 Munster titles. This was only a natural progression. It’s not that black and white coming off underage success but it’s not far off it either.
(It’s dangerous to say this in these happy times for Cork but it would be a dangerous thing for us in Cork if this team’s great success papered over the cracks we have at underage and colleges level. We’ve only to look around us at our neighbours in Munster to see what talents they are each growing on their underage allotments. Mushrooms maybe, but mushrooms won’t stave away a famine. If Cork win on September 8, it would be dangerous for us to swallow any propaganda that this was part of some five-year plan).
Clare learned this. When the great, fearsome team of the 1990s went away they found they had nothing coming through to replace them. There wasn’t a structure in place that took the skills of all the kids whose imaginations had been fired up in the glory years after 1995 and turned those skills into a team which would continue the legacy.
(It was almost too late by the time they got things right but they have them right now and the energy of Clare hurling is coming from places like Clonlara and Cratloe and Crusheen).
At the beginning and the end of it all back then for Clare was one Davy Fitz. He was a force of nature. Not a rainbow or a spring shower. Some kind of walking cyclone. We wouldn’t have had a lot of time for each other. Playing with Munster was the only time we were thrown together. If Brendan Cummins of Tipp was the other goalie, myself and himself could rub along grand. If it was me and Davy, we snarled at each other like the two most dementedly competitive lunatics on the block. We’d have no interest in having a cup of tea and a chat together but I always knew where he was coming from.
I stood behind the goals in Páirc Uí Chaoimh in 1999 specifically to study himself and Cummins when Clare played Tipp. I got the All Star that year but I know that Davy Fitz deserved it. It was reversed I reckon in 2005 but in 1999, for that afternoon alone, he deserved the All Star.
Paul Shelley was full-forward for Tipp that afternoon. He could have been a hero. Should have been.
A couple of things stood out for me that day, however. Into a blinding sun, facing the charge of the light brigade, Davy could catch a ball underneath the crossbar. And he is not a big man. In golf they say you drive for show and you putt for dough. Goalies know what looks good and what is a real challenge. That’s a real challenge. That is as tough as it gets in that position.
Shelley was through that day with a couple of minutes to go and Davy made a ferocious save, a brilliant save that kept them alive. Now you’re a goalie in that atmosphere at the height of the game and your adrenalin goes mad when you make a save like that. But a minute or so later Clare got a penalty and Davy made his way up the field to take it. If he scored Clare got to live another day. If he didn’t score they were out.
How could you calm yourself? But…
Just before the penalty, one of the Tipp corner backs got injured. I don’t remember if it was Liam Sheedy or Donnacha Fahy; I think it was Sheedy though. Davy went to take the penalty. Davy’s preferred and natural strike of the ball in that position would have been from right to left. At that moment, every sports shrink and every coach would tell you to fall back on muscle memory and do what you are most comfortable with. But Davy struck the ball low the other direction at the injured Sheedy. Goal.
Some people wouldn’t give Davy the credit for that. I would but even if you don’t, his performance topped by the moment of cold blood it took to score a penalty against Cummins was incredible. Maybe he’s mad like they say but for me there’s a method in there.
Ha! He was something else. Cork forwards used to talk of the abuse he’d give them. I remember in 2005 when we beat them he picked up the umpire’s green flag and waved it at the Cork crowd. We’d won but he hadn’t been beaten for a goal and he was defiant right to the end.
The challenge he has now isn’t much different than the challenge he had in his playing days. All that madness and passion he had for the game, he had to control it and put his hand up under the crossbar and catch a dropping ball as he faced the blinding sun. He had to go the length of the field in the dying seconds and weigh up the weakest link in the lads on the line trying to save his penalty.
For the next few weeks he has to control the madness of Clare, the precociousness of his team, the expectations and the criticisms. He has the attention to detail to carry it off.
I used to take a look at Davy’s hurleys. You can tell a lot from a fella’s hurleys, about how engaged his brain is with the game. You could see the attention to detail. Davy’s hurleys were always perfectly gripped. Always good hurleys and he would often have two bits of band on the back of the bas. It doesn’t matter whether those two strips of band made a difference or not. You could tell that this fella was thinking about the game night and day just by having them there looking for the edge.
This summer, referees have shipped a lot of criticism for high-profile mistakes in big games. There have been mistakes, human errors but what has gone unnoticed is that the way the game has been refereed has put the emphasis back on skill.
We were in danger of going in a direction of being left with a game that only allowed for players who were six feet two and fifteen stone to play it. Fellas with the resilience of rugby wing-forwards, who could bounce off the third man tackle, disarm the spare hand interference, drive through the neck high challenge and then think about getting rid of the ball.
We have evolved this summer into a game of fast movement which uses the spaces. It is a healthy response and one that thoughtful hurling people saw coming. Two of the more thoughtful teams have reached the September summit playing that way. Lads like Daniel Kearney and Podge Collins can light up the game in the same way the Joe Deanes and the Jamesie O Connors did in the past.
Across the ring in the red corner Davy Fitz faces another icon. Davy and Jimmy have brought their thoroughly modern teams along at just the right time. It’s some jungle. It’s some rumble. Two characters who can float like butterflies and sting like bees once they hold the nerve…
This is the latest of Dónal Óg Cusack’s exclusive ‘On The Line’ hurling columns in 2013, which will feature on GAA.ie throughout the summer. The opinions expressed in this column are personal and are not necessarily those of the Association.
I’d respectfully suggest that Davy hit the ball to the right because Cummins, being a left handed keeper would find it harder to get across to that side.
Not so subtle dig at Kilkenny in there too.
[quote=“chewy louie, post: 820602, member: 1137”]On the Line: Donal Óg Cusack on Hurling
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
and the strange thing which we realised afterwards was that when we stopped and thought about it, we almost expected to win it. Our sense of entitlement came back. We’d won two minor Munster titles and three U21 Munster titles. This was only a natural progression. It’s not that black and white coming off underage success but it’s not far off it either.
.[/quote]
[quote=“caoimhaoin, post: 819675, member: 273”]
You are making excuses for a team that completely flopped. It’s absolute horse shit to say you can get caught by a younger team etc. limerick should have been stamping their authority on the game, playing the way they wanted to. Instead they collapsed.
It.[/quote]
maybe you’ll believe it when one of your own says it…
I think he writes great articles - always worth a read, always have a couple of interesting anecdotes and some thought provokings insights. A lot better than most of the crap written in the newspapers anyhow.
I have no idea what your point is? Or in fact the context of what donal Og is talking about
Maybe try read the article? His point is Donal Og contradicts your point about Limerick, as Scumpot highlighted in his posts above.
It doesn’t contradict anything.
Cork then are not compare able to Clare now. Cork had a shit load of experience on that team. Clare are even more unique in that they are pretty much a complete new team. Also you simply cannot compare the Limerick of last Sunday to that 99 Clare side.
Cork had timing on their side in 99 (Clare at end of their cycle), Limerick are not as good as this Clare side and never will be, and while older there is a much closer age average.
But more than anything, that cherry picker scumpot is up on mustn’t haven’t much of a jib cos he’s really only clutching at straws.
[quote=“caoimhaoin, post: 820615, member: 273”]It doesn’t contradict anything.
Cork then are not compare able to Clare now.[/quote]
o_O
[quote=“caoimhaoin, post: 820615, member: 273”]It doesn’t contradict anything.
.
But more than anything, that cherry picker scumpot is up on mustn’t haven’t much of a jib cos he’s really only clutching at straws.[/quote]
No…I just like highlighting what a bullshit artist you are…
PS a cherry picker to clutch straws??..
But I disagree with that, as I explained. Do I have to agree with everything just cos he writes it? It’s a good article, but Cork 99 are a fair bit different to this Clare team.
I suppose you’d be a better judge of that than Donal Óg Cusack alright. :rolleyes:
he’s not talking about their styles you twat…he’s talking about being a young player in '99 and beginning to believe they can do at senior what they were doing at underage…in the way Clare did when they got a run on limerick…how is this so difficult for you to understand?? being the big Sports Psychologist that you are?..its pretty fookin basic …
FFS, do we have to have played in an All Ireland final now to have an opinion?
Cork had a few of 28+ players on their team. They had All Ireland winners, they had some seriously physical and big players. They had a shit load of experience. They had a good few players starved of adult success.
Clare have none of that really, they would be one of (if not the) youngest All Ireland winning teams since Cork in 1966.
What Donal Og is remembering is his experience and how it resembles the present Clare team.
Understand this.
The styles are very different.
He is talking about his own experience and should not have compared the whole Cork team to this Clare team, I disagree with that. Cork had loads of Senior experience.
The other thing, Limerick were shit.