there was two Tommy o briens. One from the well and one from bruff or bruree
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The well one was with the seniors. He was on the frees wasnt he?
Alan o Connor I think
Boys this is a great resource - fair play to Munster council - all grades here over the years
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No.
Some intermediate team we had in 2016
The starting fifteen is as follows 1. Eoghan McNamara (Doon), 2. Mike Casey (Na Piarsaigh), 3. Barry Lynch (Feohanagh), 4. Seán Flanagan (Feohanagh), 5. Mark Carmody (Patrickswell)(Captain), 6. Ronan Lynch (Na Piarsaigh), 7. Colin Ryan (Pallasgreen), 8. Pat Ryan (Doon), 9. Lorcan Lyons (Monaleen), 10. David Dempsey (Na Piarsaigh), 11. William O Donoghue (Na Piarsaigh), 12. Andrew La Touche-Cosgrave (Monaleen), 13. Aaron Gillane (Patrickswell), 14. Kevin O’Brien (Patrickswell) and 15. Peter Casey (Na Piarsaigh)
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It was a then “B” team rather than an intermediate team
U23’s was it?
Would any Kilkenny player from 2000 - 2020 get into the current Limerick starting 15?
TJ Reid perhaps.
Peter Casey comes in and within 3/4 minutes wins two frees and sets Hego up for a score… It’s relentless.
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U25?
Kieran Shannon in the Cork Examiner. He has nailed it, this group is superior to Loughnane’s Clare.
We’ve come to take Limerick’s excellence so much for granted now it’s easy to forget their mediocrity from not that long ago.
In 2016, their championship petered out for a second consecutive year on a Saturday evening with Semple Stadium not even a third full, Clare the least-worst side in a drab second-round qualifier, just as Ger Cunningham’s Dublin had been against TJ Ryan’s men 12 months earlier.
In that same goalless as well as listless affair with Clare which proved to be TJ’s last game over his native county, the sides could only muster 34 points between them, a tally which Limerick surpassed by themselves when the counties met in the opening game of this year’s championship.
And it wasn’t like either Dublin or Clare were any great shakes back then. Their next day out, they each lost by a couple of goals in an All-Ireland quarter-final. That 2015 win over Limerick was about as good as it ever got for Ger Cunningham in his time with the Dubs while Davy Fitz would exit the Clare dressing room for good just two weeks after TJ last stepped foot in Limerick’s.
At least in 2017, Limerick didn’t bow out lamely, putting it right up to Kilkenny in Nowlan Park, but as it turned out that particular Kilkenny team would have the inglorious distinction of becoming the only Brian Cody team not to make it to at least the All-Ireland quarter-final. For all the progress John Kiely felt had been made behind the scenes, the bottom line for everyone else to see was that in his first year in charge, his team had lost both their championship games and had failed again to escape from Division 1B.
They were by a distance the fifth team in Munster, the other four all making it to the All-Ireland quarter-final at least of that year’s championship.
In fact you could say that over that three-year period Limerick were the worst of the nine recognised hurling counties.
While they’d failed to make even an All-Ireland quarter-final between 2015 and 2017, everyone else in that time span had, with all of them bar Dublin getting that far at least twice.
As we now know, later on that 2017 hurling season, Limerick would win the U21 All Ireland, the county’s second in three years. But even with that, there was only the promise of Limerick contending, hardly dominating.
It all seems so predictable now, the narrative so linear and obvious — founding an academy adhering to best practice, reaching a couple of All-Ireland minor final followed by winning a couple of U21s, then appointing and assembling a top, cutting-edge senior management team. But the reality is no one — not even JP or Kiely — could have envisaged Limerick winning this many All-Irelands so soon and the second of them so comprehensively.
We’ve often seen counties in either code win a glut of underage honours only for tomorrow to never come. Should Galway win next Saturday’s U20 All Ireland football final, it’ll be the fifth time the county has won at either that age group or U21 over the last 18 years — a record only equalled by Dublin themselves during that period — yet their seniors have reached just one All Ireland semi-final in that time.
The Limerick three-in-a-row U21 teams of the early noughties have been the ultimate cautionary tale for their countymen and everyone else. Even the Clare three-in-a-row U21 teams of the early part of the last decade ultimately underwhelmed — just the one All-Ireland, one league, no Munster — their future now already the past.
And while you’d have to think time is still on the side of all those Kerry minors that helped the county to five straight All-Irelands, their current age profile wouldn’t be much different to this group of Limerick hurlers who lost two finals in that grade but have now won two at senior.
Mickey Harte’s all-dominant underage Tyrone teams did deliver on all their promise but in many ways, Limerick’s conversion of underage success into senior silverware has been even more spectacular — by being less foreseen.
Two years before Harte got his hands on them at senior, players like Cormac McAnallen and Stephen O’Neill had already won either an All Star or Player of the Year. They’d won an Ulster. A year later, they’d win a league. Anyone who saw them play in 2001 or 2002 knew they were potential world-beaters, that they were already a thrilling side with obvious blue-chip talents. It was just a matter whether they’d be able to make the leap from stars to champions.
With Limerick, it wasn’t like that. No one watching that dull game against Clare in Thurles in 2016 could have predicted that most of their team that night would win an All-Ireland within two years, and that nine of them a further two years on would win another lapping the field, not merely pipping it on the line by a nose.
Tom Morrissey and Gearóid Hegarty both came on at half-time that evening against Clare. No one that night thought they were looking at two players who’d combine for 12 points from play in an All-Ireland final the same way anyone who watched Stephen O’Neill and Owen Mulligan terrorise Armagh in Clones in 2001 could visualise them tormenting Kerry some September in Croker within four years. Aaron Gillane at 19 was no obvious talent like Seán Cavanagh was at the same age.
In short, these Limerick players are the most unlikely of world-beaters.
That is a credit to themselves and the academy’s values of humility and continuous self-improvement but above all it is testament to Kiely’s exceptional management and his exceptional management team: Paul Kinnerk’s work on the training ground, Caroline Currid’s work on the mindset, Joe O’Connor and Mikey Kiely’s work on their bodies.
Already, as incredible it is to say, Kiely’s Limerick are the equal of Loughnane’s Clare — their two All-Irelands and two Munsters and two Leagues the match of the two Liam MacCarthys and three Munsters that Dalo lifted when you consider the comprehensive manner which all but the first of those Limerick honours were won.
Even at their peak, and even though they invented the notion of power hurling, Loughnane teams didn’t steamroll the opposition, at least on the scoreboard, a couple of replays against Waterford and Tipperary excepted.
Their average winning margin on the way to winning their second All-Ireland was three points. Limerick’s this year was 7.4. In their past two championship meetings with Tipperary, a champion side, they’ve won by a combined 21 points. Again no one, even in the giddy, heady days that was the autumn of 2018, could have foreseen that.
The manner in which they’ve driven on from that breakthrough All-Ireland win of 2018 is virtually unmatched for a non-traditional power. Likewise the respect they have shown for every competition. Going two out of three in all four competitions — don’t forget the Munster hurling league, the tournament formerly known as the Waterford Crystal, because Kiely’s men haven’t — ain’t just ain’t bad but remarkable, relentless, Cody and Gavin-like.
In fact these days the Dublin footballers are no longer that pushed about the O’Byrne Cup.
While we should all just savour what Limerick have done this year, it is impossible not to think, with the age profile they have, of what more they could go on to do.
The last time there was a non-Kilkenny team with such possibilities was Tipperary a decade ago. And this time, there is no hint of Limerick’s Liam Sheedy stepping away and disrupting their continuity. Nor is there a Kilkenny empire waiting to strike back — though it’ll be fascinating how Sheedy himself responds and reinvents Tipp.
But whatever expectations we now all have for Limerick, part of the magic about this team is that they own their own and no one has higher.
And they’ve already dwarfed ours.
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Looks like good craic.
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Nancy’s always was a great auld spot. Your miss the tequila song out the back
Win the All-Ireland and Nancy Blakes could get shut down for a potential breach of guidelines.
Halcyon Days 
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But Nancy’s has very close links to one of the Limerick players …
Strange how you read one thing, but came away with something else.
In fairness that article was a load of bilge. No one who saw that Limerick minor team in 2013 would have doubted that it would become the foundation of a great senior team. Anyone looking at the Munster minor final of 2013 would have realised that good as they were the Waterford team had many of the old Waterford failings.
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