Correct, he already is a star, joint favourite for hurler of the year with Joe Canning. I don’t buy this talk about him being predictable, he’s a great forward who can win any type of ball. Goals aren’t happening for him in the last two games but everything else is outstanding
Yeah his movement and first touch is so good, he thrives off low ball in. And if he is isolated one on one, he can beat most players in the air.
He’s quick and pretty strong so he’s a good runner, hard to stop once he gets going. Mightn’t have as good a step as Mulcahy or Casey but he doesn’t need a whole pile of space to score.
He is a serious forward. It’s mad that this is pretty much his debut season.
Fairly sure he came on late on for a few minutes against Tipp in the annihilation in the GG in 2015…?
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Played (and scored) against Westmeath in 2016 also.
Your right game came on for James Ryan against tipp. Duck me that was a dark day.
Erskine Childers was only in the job a few weeks when Limerick won in 1973. The fellow he took over from grew up in Bruree.
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How I remember these utterly meaningless things I’ll never know 
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True fan.
Lads we all truly believe we are a serious hurling county. The reality is that we have 1 All Ireland in the last 78 years. We need to rectify this and I believe we will.
Say no more. Lived in Bruree and went to school in Charleville. Some combination that.
Born in the US and was a Member of Parliament for Clare. He had a lot of bases covered.
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HURLING
Passionate Limerick fans pose cruel risk to chances
Paul Keane, GAA Reporter
July 31 2018, 12:01am, The Times
The treatment of Anthony Foley in the months before his death seemed to be weighing on Shane Dowling’s mind in the immediate aftermath of Limerick’s victory over Cork on Sunday.
Pushed into a post-match interview with RTÉ, the easy option for Dowling would have been to pore over his game-changing, 1-4 cameo as a substitute. Instead, the 25-year-old made a passionate appeal to his county’s supporters to keep their distance from the players before Limerick’s All-Ireland final date on August 19.
It was a theme continued by John Kiely, the Limerick manager, when he began his post-match press briefing with a stern warning. “If one player is contacted directly [before the final] I will shut the whole thing down,” Kiely said to reporters, a request that was ultimately well-meaning and resonated with Ger Loughnane’s observation that when Limerick most recently reached the All-Ireland final 11 years ago, they got “swamped by the hype”.
Passions run typically high in the sport-mad county, which aside from the rugby players it has produced, has largely been starved of success.
Last May, the Limerick FC soccer team complained about individuals who were abusing a number of their “home-grown, local players”. “We do not want and do not need these people at our games,” the club wrote in an official statement.
The words were eerily similar to those issued by Kiely early last year after his players were verbally abused during a heavy pre-season defeat by Cork. “Stay away from future matches,” Kiely told the disgruntled supporters.
The problem now is different — with Kiely and Dowling wary of the same fans overburdening the players with expectation in the build-up to next month’s final.
Dowling has witnessed this flip- flopping of attitudes in the county himself, most notably in the case of Foley, the former Munster rugby captain and head coach, whose untimely passing in late 2016 came after a difficult period in charge of his province.
“Before he died, Anthony was getting a lot of criticism,” Dowling wrote in The Sports Chronicle earlier this month. “His sister Rosie expressed that so well in the fantastic documentary that was made about his life. What happened to him was so tragic and his critics straight away changed their attitude and talked about what a fantastic person he was, both on and off the field, as a manager and a player.
“So, people respect and appreciate what you’re doing for your team and your community but sometimes they crave success so badly that they can go overboard in their criticism.
“Limerick is probably the place where that is most obvious because the fans are just so passionate and everyone in the country can see what a fantastic sporting city it is.”
The cruel irony, and one that shows up time and again in hurling, is that while supporters can drive a team to an All-Ireland final — providing a 16th man on occasions like last Sunday at Croke Park — they can also ruin their chances of actually winning a championship.
The year after Limerick were heavily defeated by Kilkenny in the 2007 decider, for example, Waterford suffered a similar fate, again at the hands of Brian Cody’s Kilkenny.
“The thing that I learnt with Waterford the last time was that maybe lads got caught up in the hype,” Davy Fitzgerald, the Waterford manager in 2008, told Clare FM on the eve of Clare’s final win in 2013. “It was very hard because Waterford hadn’t been in a final for 45 years. Trust me, if you get caught up in the hype you are in trouble.”
Limerick, as it happens, will be aiming to bridge their own 45-year gap when they play Galway or Clare on August 18.
On paper, they have a greater chance than the 2007 side, yet the next three weeks, if not handled properly, could undermine their entire challenge.
“The fans carried me shoulder-high off the field that day [when Limerick won the 2013 Munster final],” Dowling recalled in The Sports Chronicle.
“I don’t think it was me in particular, they just saw a player and fired him up on their shoulders in the excitement of it all.
“If Limerick were to ever win an All-Ireland again you could end up on the roof of Croke Park.”
Jesus wept brining Anthony Foley into this is completely bizarre. Leave that mans family to grieve in piece or move on. He was a big clare Gaa man. Typrical shit from the media. Bottom of the barrel stuff.
Kiely knows how vicious ye can be. The mob on here are tearing strips off each other already.
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Did kiely ever mention Anthony Foley?
Did Dowling?
Dowling appeared to mention Anthony Foley a month ago in a seperate interview. Did he mention him on Sunday? I don’t think he did. If he did i missed. Dowling looked like a lad totally overjoyed I didn’t hear him mention anthony Foley at all.
Fucking animals.
When you look at the highlights reel for Gillane’s first catch you can see his hurley goes flying back and looks to have been pulled back and not dropped. You can see here that Spillane has his own hurley in his right hand and looks to be letting go of Gillane’s hurley with his left extended back… you can almost see by the way Gillane’s arm is (and motion of Spillane’s arm) that the hurley has been ripped
The ref rode us all day to be fair - but the players got on with it.
I get it. It’s probably easier to pick up on that rather than confront the truth about the depraved nature of the Limerick following.