Joe Canning, Unquestionably the GOAT

Sport
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Library by day, Clems by night.

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By Joe Canning

Fri Jun 17 2022 - 06:00

On a very basic level, if Clare repeat the performance they put in during the Munster final, they will surely beat Wexford.

They reached a level in that game that is a good bit above what Wexford have shown so far. If they reach it again, they should be through to the All-Ireland semi-final.

But doing it again isn’t straightforward. For a start, lifting everybody in the group after losing an epic Munster final after extra-time is very difficult. A game like that takes so much out of you mentally and physically. Getting yourself ready for an All-Ireland quarter-final 13 days later is a job in itself, whatever the circumstances.

In Clare’s case this time around, there has been a potentially bigger problem in the two suspensions that hung over Rory Hayes and Peter Duggan until late on Wednesday night. At least they know now that the two boys are available. Training on Thursday would have been buzzing. It could be exactly the lift they need at just the right time.

We won’t know for sure until the game is over what effect it all had. These things can be a huge distraction. Not so much because of the suspensions themselves, although that side of it is tricky to handle, especially when you’re appealing them. Planning becomes that bit more complicated when you’re not sure who you’re going to have available.

If you pour too much of your energy into thinking the world is against you, you risk becoming over-invested in the wrong thing

But the bigger distraction for Clare had to be the fact that this became such a public topic of conversation. All through last week and into this week, people in Clare were going on social media and giving out about an agenda against the county. Clare people love to have a chip on their shoulder.

There have been columns in newspapers, people talking on radio, lot and lots of grievances being aired. The one thing you can tell from all that is that this was a huge talking point within the county.

If you were a Clare player trying to prepare for an All-Ireland quarter-final, this was the last thing you need. Because all of a sudden, the major theme of the week was something that actually had nothing to do with the game. It must have been difficult for them not to lose focus.

A distraction like this can be lethal. Everywhere you go, you have people telling you it’s awful for the two lads. Everyone you come into contact with is either asking if there’s an appeal or telling you Clare are always hard done by in these situations. Or they’re saying it’s trial by media, or that the GAA are a disgrace. All the other talking points you’ve heard a hundred times by now. And every bit of headspace you’re giving it is a bit of headspace you aren’t giving Wexford.

It’s so tricky to navigate for the Clare management. If you start to try and build up a siege mentality, it might not be enough to do the job you need to do. Game preparation has to be about what you’re going to do on the day against Wexford. If you pour too much of your energy into thinking the world is against you, you risk becoming over-invested in the wrong thing.

When you are building your siege mentality, you’re not thinking about how you’re going to set up. You’re not thinking about how you’re going to play. You’re not going over match-ups. Most of all, you’re not thinking about Wexford.

They have no role in your siege mentality. They weren’t involved at any stage in the proceedings. There was no Wexford pundit on The Sunday Game picking out incidents. They’re just sitting there waiting while you focus on something other than them. It suits them down to the ground.

The big positive for Clare is that it was eventually sorted on Wednesday night. That gives them two and a half days to move on and refocus. It didn’t drag on closer to the weekend and they have clarity on who is available to them. No distractions. Just a clear run at the job they have to do.

Still, for Wexford, this is a bit of a free hit. Nobody really expected them to be here after Dublin beat them in Wexford Park. Most people presumed that was the third-place decider in the Leinster championship. So they kind of have nothing to lose.

Darragh Egan has done a good job with them. I’ve noticed that as the season has worn on, they’ve gone back a little bit to setting up the way they did under Davy Fitz. Not all the time but here and there, as if it’s a habit they can’t quite shake. I think that’s very understandable and it’s a good sign of what a smart coach Egan is.

It’s a results-driven business and it would have been very hard to completely change tack on a team that had been together for five or six years playing in a particular way.

Any time we played against Wexford, our big focus was on tracking their runners. We never really went for man-markers – it was more about matching them when they became very fluid.

Lee Chin would obviously have to be watched but it was more a case of passing him on. If he was around centre-forward, Gearóid McInerney took him up. If he went into the full-forward line, Daithí Burke would do it. You had to match him physically, more so than follow him around and tag his every move.

The Wexford half-backs got forward to join in the attacks the whole time, so we always had to be vigilant as forwards and make sure to track them. They often flew forward to get in around the break from puck-out.

Mark Fanning would hit a long puck-out and someone like Diarmuid O’Keefe would sprint forward, even going past his own half-forward line to get in around the break. Joe Cooney was huge for us when we played Wexford, tracking back those sort of runners and helping out his defenders.

Matthew O’Hanlon used to man-mark me in those games and we’d play a bit of cat and mouse with each other. He would get forward and join in the attacks as well and a lot of the time I would have to go with him because he was well capable of taking his point when he got the chance. That was obviously a part of their game plan, to try and drag me away from their goal.

But I remember a few times deciding to let him off and to start heading in towards full-forward, just to see what he would do. A couple of times he looked around and saw me trotting off in the other direction and he had a decision to make. I could see him cursing me as he came back after me. Same as I would be when I’d have no choice but to chase back after him. Defenders getting forward is still a feature of Wexford’s game so Clare will have to be conscious of that throughout.

The big call Wexford have to make is what to do about Tony Kelly. It’s all very well saying you have to put a man-marker on him but you have to think long and hard about who that man-marker is. It has to be someone who is willing to completely sacrifice his game. He has to be happy not to touch the ball all day if that’s what it takes. It can’t be one of the defenders who is going to get forward and try to score. The job for the day has to be keeping Tony Kelly to two or three points from play, nothing else.

In the end, this will come down to Clare’s mental preparation above all else. They have the better team, especially back at full strength with Hayes and Duggan good to go. They are physical enough and fast enough and fit enough to beat Wexford. They have shown how good they are when they perform to their highest level. Getting that performance is the job now.

The other game is going to boil down to a battle for control of the middle third of the pitch. You have two sides who both know that winning clean ball around the middle is the platform for everything they want to do.

They differ in how they want to use the ball but they are very similar in where they need to start. For both of them, losing the middle third means losing the game.

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Cork’s Séamus Harnedy and Galway’s Padraic Mannion during the AHL clash at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho

Cork have won three games on the bounce so they’re coming in with confidence flowing through them. Like all Cork teams, they will hurl if they’re let hurl. They want to free their runners coming through that middle third – Darragh Fitzgibbon, Luke Meade, Robbie O’Flynn. If they can get those guys on lot of ball coming at speed, it means space opens up around them and for the forwards up ahead of them. That’s how they want to play.So the job for Galway is to negate that. This involves standing up to them physically around the middle third, getting in their faces, giving them no time on the ball. It’s crucial for Galway not to stand off the Cork players and give them time in possession in this part of the pitch because the knock-on effect is what that does to their own full-back line.

There is very little any full-back line can do if there’s no pressure on the ball out the field. If you leave brilliant stickmen time and space to pick out their passes into the full-forward line, you’re hanging your inside defenders out to dry. So that’s the key for Galway – the Cork runners have to be stopped at source around the middle.

And by the same token, the big thing missing from Galway’s performance in the Leinster final was that lack of clean ball into the full-forward line from that middle third. Kilkenny were able to get in there and disrupt the supply of ball into Conor Whelan and Brian Concannon. They were the ones who brought the physicality in and around there, not Galway.

So really, both teams go to Thurles looking for the same thing. Win the battle for the middle of the pitch and take it from there. Purely because they have to have been so disappointed with how the last day turned out, I expect a big reaction from Galway, especially in that area. I think it should be enough to see them through. I couldn’t see them laying a glove on Limerick in the semi final though.

Joe Canning|84x0

[

Joe Canning

](Joe Canning - The Irish Times)

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Joe is a great lad.

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Crafty fucker

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There was a queue outside Camile Thai yesterday, great marketing from Joe. He has the simpletons lining up to hand him money.

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He hasn’t got the big house fooled though.

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He’s reaping the low hanging fruit.

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You begin to see why a very talented Galway side won an awful lot less than they should have.

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If Pat McDonagh brings Joe to play at Augusta he’ll have a mental breakdown.

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He’d be lucky to get a bag of chips off Pat.

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Simpleton writes/says…
Simpletons lap it up….
Simpletons hand over the dough….

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No one would know better than yourself.

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Ok Mr Pacifist :+1:

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We’d have absolutely savage respect for Joe.

Saying that, it’s getting a bit awks now…

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He’d want to climb off your leg shortly

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Intinsity

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Jaysus that’s hilarious from a chap who cried the place down when lads singled him out in club games.

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Joe is appearing on possibly every media platform available pumping out the nice guy image.
You can’t open a webpage from Mumsnet to Tattle life but Joe has an opinion and goms lapping it up.

Does Joe work at all or is his opinion so valuable that he can charge for it……
There’s some composing on them articles on the IT, he must have a PR agent writing thesis permanently.

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On freetaking

By Joe Canning

Fri Jun 24 2022 - 05:00

People take freetakers for granted. Among pundits, among the general public, it’s like they aren’t really noticed until they start missing – and then nobody notices anything else. A high return from your freetaker isn’t hoped for, it’s expected. When it doesn’t happen, it stands out a mile.

Last weekend, Cork and Clare both had freetakers who had off days. Clare only scored five points from 14 frees/65s, Cork scored seven from 12. Clare got away with it, Cork didn’t. I watched both matches, knowing what the guys out on the pitch were going through. The pressure involved is intense.

[ Galway punish Cork inaccuracy as Shefflin’s men hang on by slimmest of margins ]

When it goes right for freetakers, I’m not sure they get the credit they deserve. How often do you hear someone going, “He scored 10 frees but he got nothing from play”? The implication is that if you didn’t score from play, how have you contributed? Okay, you scored your frees but that’s your job. As if those 10 frees were handy scores.

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Missed frees came back to bite Cork in their defeat to Galway. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho

Now, some of them probably were – I would guess that if you took any of the teams in the championship, you could give the frees to anyone from 1 to 15 and they’d probably score half of them. Some of them would maybe get up to around seven out of 10.

There was a time when scoring seven frees out of 10 was seen as a good enough day’s work for a specialist freetaker. But any team that has a seven-out-of-10 return over the coming weeks will be in real danger of coming out on the wrong side of a tight result. The standard is just too high. Can Clare survive a repeat performance the next day with TJ Reid on the frees for Kilkenny? I doubt it.

So when I hear someone dismissing a freetaker’s 10 frees, my mind goes to the three that would have been missed by the other players on his team. Those are the pressure ones, the ones that are on a tight angle or into a tricky wind but that absolutely need to be nailed. Those three frees are the difference between losing and winning and they’re the ones the freetaker is there to convert.

It sticks in your head. I had a free to level the All-Ireland final in injury-time in 2012. I had missed one just before it and I knew this was the last puck of the game. Right at that moment, as I got ready to take it, the thought that was in my head was that if I didn’t score it, those two missed frees were all anyone was going to point to as being the difference between us and Kilkenny.

Personally, I liked that pressure. I think most freetakers probably do. They want to be the one who has to take on the shot to save the game or to win it. That’s who they were in their back garden when they were eight years old, lining up a free to win the All-Ireland final. I enjoyed the pressure of taking them when it really counted. It appealed to the competitor in me.

The hardest frees come at the start of the game and at the end. The ones in the middle are usually all part of the flow of the game – you’re settled, you have your eye in, you’re keeping the scoreboard ticking along. But you need that first one to settle you and get you into the game. That ramps up the pressure on it.

All you want is a nice handy one in front of the posts to start off. It isn’t even so much for you, it’s nearly for the crowd more so. Because you always hear them groaning if you miss the first one. You can sense their frustration and it can have a huge bearing on you. So you always want to put that to bed as quickly as you can.

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Tony Kelly had one of those days from the dead ball but Clare still managed to get over the line. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho

I think a bit of that applied to Tony Kelly on Saturday. He missed a handy enough one and then soon after he missed a 65. You could hear the crowd getting a bit anxious. Then he went back into his own half to take a long one. I was in the RTÉ box at the time and I was beside Davy Fitzgerald. “He shouldn’t go back for this,” I said to Fitzy.

It was a low-percentage shot, far from the ideal chance to get himself back into the game. He missed it and then he missed one from play a bit later. He got himself up and running as the game wore on but Peter Duggan had to take over the frees. That’s two games in a row where Clare have had to change freetaker midway through. It’s an obvious area they will have to tighten up on.

I always found that you can’t really separate freetaking from your general game play. It’s part and parcel of your game. If you score that settling free early on, it can give you the confidence to play well in open play. If you miss a few in a row, it can be tricky to find your general form.

In 2014, the Galway management decided to take me off the frees and to put Conor Cooney on them. They had no issue with my strike rate or anything – I think it was as much to get Conor into the game a bit more. I didn’t mind. All that mattered to me was that they were scored. This was for the betterment of the team so it didn’t bother me one way or the other.

Your routine is everything when it comes to taking frees. The aim is always to keep is as basic as possible and to do the same thing each time. A big part of it is getting your heart-rate down so that you take emotion out of it. This is harder than it sounds – you’re in the thick of a championship match after all. You’ve been running around all over the place, putting in hits, taking hits. And all the time you want to take to slow down your heart-rate, the opposition supporters are telling you to get on with it and stop wasting time.

[ Joe Canning: I loved having a chip on the shoulder, I wanted it ]

But your routine has to be your routine. You train for that moment to keep your routine the same no matter what, be it in the first minute or the last minute, be it out on the wing or in front of the posts. My routine was to stand over the ball, shrug my shoulders back and take three deep breaths to get myself relaxed. After that, it’s a matter of trusting your practice and believing in the work you have done.

There’s not a lot of variation between the different grounds around the country when it comes to freetaking. There’s a few places alright where the posts are shorter than others – Walsh Park in Waterford springs to mind. It can be tricky taking frees there because although the target is the same size as everywhere else, the picture in your mind is that bit smaller as you stand over the free.

Croke Park can be a difficult place too when you start taking frees there for the first time. I guess it must be because of the design of the stadium but it’s a place with a really strange wind. It swirls around and goes in different directions throughout the game so it can be very hard for you to trust it.

I’ve been there on days when the flags on the Hogan Stand side have been pointing one way and the ones on the Cusack Stand side are going the other. Or when the flags on the wall up behind Hill 16 are being whipped by the wind and the ones down on the pitch are just hanging down limp. Even on a calm day, you can never fully trust that a gust isn’t going to come in from some weird angle at the wrong time.

The only way to get good at taking frees in Croke Park is to take frees at Croke Park. Everybody struggles at the start but the longer you go in your career, the more you get used to it. Eventually, you come to learn what works and you get back to focusing on your routine.

I loved taking frees. I enjoyed the challenge and I wanted the pressure. I knew that if they went wrong on me, I would get stick for it. I was okay with that. These games matter to people. If it’s your job to score the frees, you should feel like you’ve let people down if you don’t get them.

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Galway look dejected after Limerick’s victory in the 2018 All-Ireland final. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times

If I could have one free back from my career, it would be the one at the end of the 2018 All-Ireland final against Limerick. I should have scored it. I know I should have. It was within my range but I tried to hit it too hard and I didn’t connect as well as I should have. I let people down on that one. No two ways about it.

And I accept that people have a right to be annoyed about it. that’s what I was out there to do and I didn’t do it. Put it this way – I would rather they were annoyed to what I get instead. I live in Limerick and there isn’t a week goes by where somebody doesn’t thank me for missing that free and dropping it short. Trust me, I’d much prefer someone would give out to me than have to live with the thanks of the Limerick public! I don’t begrudge them their victory though, they deserved to win that day. The people of Limerick have been absolutely brilliant to me, I love it down here. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

But that’s what happens to you when you’re a freetaker. Eventually, in a crucial game, it’s going to come down to you. Miss and you’ll hear about it for years. Score and you’re just doing your job. No point giving out about it. That’s just the way it is.

Joe Canning|84x0

[

Joe Canning

](Joe Canning - The Irish Times)

All-Ireland and All Star winning former Galway hurler Joe Canning writes for the Irish Times every week

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