Feel free to disagree with me by all means. You are the only one with a bitter and personal agenda that abuses players.
I think there is a lot more to come from Flanagan, (thatâs praise by the way). He had a mixed championship, he was outstanding in one game and very good in the final, the other games not so much (thatâs balance). A very good season overall considering where he came from (praise).
Itâs odd that it offends you that I donât have a weird fanboy obsession with him like you do.
nah, there isnât enough hurling in that part of the City and the country lads wonât be going in there with all the secondary schools around now.
It was a great school, with all the roasters and townies mixing in and making the best of it. The education wasnât great but the schooling was unrale
Not at all. I donât have any obsession with him. I simply think itâs unfair you apply different standards to certain players based on the club they hurl for. It deeply sickens me in fact.
Flanagan is a work in progress. We would not have won the All-Ireland without him. He has brilliant spatial awareness, excellent workrate and plays with his head up. His hands arenât the quickest but he compensates for it in the above ways. He is absolutely central to the way this team plays and I think he has the potential to get even better. Heâll never be the type of guy whoâll go out and score 3-5 for you, though.
The skill v workrate thing is largely bunk. You wonât win an All-Ireland with a team of mullockers or equally a team of dazzlers. You need a mix of both and every team has them. Itâs getting the right mix relevant to the players at your disposal that counts.
Galway being tired due to an extra game is also nonsense. They didnât have to play a game of consequence until the Leinster Final and breezed through the round robin with hammerings of Offaly and Wexford, a comprehensive win over Kilkenny and a game of ping-pong in a dead rubber against Dublin. The Munster teams had to go to the wire every week and it was no coincidence that the three who qualified from the province all made the AI semi-finals. I expect this year to be similar. Everyone in Leinster will hammer Carlow, Kilkenny and Galway will qualify comfortably and the Wexford v Dublin game will decide the other spot. Munster is impossible to call.
Any team needs its share of good fortune to win an All-Ireland and we had plenty of it this year. Thatâs hurling, though. Itâs predictable to a reasonable extent but itâs the little intangibles that ultimately add up to success.
FFS lads yere all getting worked up about Limerick,itâll be all over as soon as Cork get a hold of ye,so hold off on the post mortems until then, honestly believe it,ye were superb last time out,but our forwards died last 5m,say ye were very well conditioned,we bloody werenât,we werenât prepared for the long haul,p.s. a a Munster man I rooted for Limerick after that,and didnât mind ye getting Liam ( on loan)
Itâs actually not that uncommon. A lot of very effective players have the same trait, From a Limerick point of view, David Breen and James Ryan were prime examples.
What tends to happen is that an awful lot of the good things that these players do goes largely unseen. Flanagan is a little more high-profile in terms of the gameplan, granted. I spent a lot of the Kilkenny game watching him off the ball and he torments defences by dragging them around even though he mightnât be immediately involved in the play.
