The talk now seems to be that Peter Duggan will be at full forward on Sunday. I am unsure about that move, it has been tried before and he never really looked comfortable there, albeit it was 6 or 7 years ago.
He played there first game against Cork in 2018, Conlon was 11 and I think scored 4/5 points. I canât remember what Duggan did that game
Fuck all and was the first forward subbed off from what i remember
I have seen him play there in various age groups and I canât remember him having a good game there. He is a right wing forward or nothing
Iâm not sure where heâll be at this season but in all fairness he went up several levels from where he was 5 or 6 years ago, bit part player to elite forward.
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[quote=âBig_Dan_Campbell, post:904, topic:35484â]
The talk now seems to be that Peter Duggan will be at full forward on Sunday
He will do fine.
Sure tis only Cork.
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Tipp
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Since back doors began in either code have outsiders ie bigger than 2/1 ever beaten the favourites twice in the one championship season?
I doubt this occurs very option. Teams playing each other twice without drawing isnât that common until recently and if a team beats another team at bigger than 2/1 and than meets them again I doubt the price would be 2/1 the next time.
It probably has occurred but Iâd say itâs a tiny sample pool.
Yeah I was presuming itâs not common. Thereâs been a fair few teams meeting twice and the likes of Kerry beating cork after being shocked the first day has happened a bit. I was thinking in terms of the old gaa cliche/truism about not showing your hand specifically in relation to a game like Waterford v limerick. ie is there any benefit at all to Waterford winning that match? Especially when itâs not a Munster final or even close to being knockout
More than likely Toome, probably Rory Brisbane, he had an awful habit of disappearing off the field about 5 min after the first Toome lad got the line, as soon as Tommy got the red card, familiarity could have kicked in and off he trotted after him.
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Roy is building it up it must be big
Darek invokes Tolkein and anticipates All Ireland glory on July 24th
Derek McGrath: If a trilogy beckons this is the chapter where Waterford must fight
Three talking points ahead of Limerick v Waterford
Waterfordâs Michael Kiely of Waterford in action against Declan Hannon of Limerick during the All-Ireland Senior Championship semi-final in 2021. Picture: EĂłin Noonan/Sportsfile
FRI, 22 APR, 2022 - 07:00
Three talking points ahead of Limerick v Waterford
- Breaking the lineâŠor a bit of both?
More than interesting to hear John Kiely lament the number of line breaks Limerick coughed up to Cork on Sunday last. Chances conceded to Conor Lehane, Shane Barrett and Jack OâConnor should have resulted in green flags. A closer analysis of the last two games between Waterford and Limerick points to Waterford butchering at least eight clear goalscoring opportunities.
One might rightly point to the brilliance of Nickie Quaid in saving shots from Jamie Barron and Austin Gleeson last year but one senses that the opportunities spurned by Jack Fagan, Calum Lyons and Stephen Bennett in previous encounters will likely see them take an extra yard or extra pass to ensure a completely clinical approach.
Tipperaryâs razor-like first half focus on preventing the counter-attack involved a condensed six backs with Ronan Maher lodging on the edge of the D. Essentially this meant that the one thing you cannot allow Waterford â âgrass to run intoâ â was deprived. But the depth with which Waterford played in the second half acted as a catalyst for the creation of space in front of Dessie Hutchinson and Mikey Kiely.
Sean OâDonnell and Paul Kinnerk will have put huge focus on Waterfordâs power plays just after half-time. Many will point to the Mikey Kiely goal but the play directly after it on 37mins 32 secs is even more compelling.
There are 10 bodies under the Brian Hogan puckout. Conor Gleeson wins and offloads to Calum Lyons to set the counter-attack in motion and Barron makes his way into the grass to receive the pass and score. Limerick will try and ensure that instead of grass Waterford will run into bodies and traffic.
The equally brilliant Michael Bevans will probably have spent time this week considering a tweak to the DĂ©ise game plan. A team built on hard running and pace, Waterford may look at moving the ball as well as themselves at breakneck speed. This may involve âbreaking the lineâ, but also quicker deliveries to an inside three.
The very few games where Limerick have struggled in the last few years include the Kilkenny semi-final of 19 and the first half of last yearâs Munster Final. Both Kilkenny and Tipperary launched aerial attacks on the central spine of the Limerick defence. Tipperary got great momentum from long direct puckouts that managed to get Declan Hannon and Diarmuid Byrnes going back towards their own goal.
- Curveballs now or save them for later
John Kielyâs naming of a dummy team, the subsequent performances of Mikey Casey and Kyle Hayes, underlines the constant evolution of Limerick. I remember in 2016 preparing for a league semi-final against Limerick and putting a huge focus on the free-scoring marauding number 12, a certain Barry Nash. The adaptability of the modern player continues to impress, and I wonder will both managers be tempted to roll the dice with one or two subtle changes.
Expected switches will see Austin Gleeson and Jamie Barron return to the starting fold but I wonder will management consider Jamieâs 10-minute cameo at full-forward in last yearâs semi-final where his difference in terms of stature and craft gave Dan Morrissey a challenging conclusion.
Do you take him away from the snare of Will OâDonoghue at the start even for 20 minutes, before restoring him to his home in the middle of the field?
Limerick may keep further curveballs for later in the year, but a possible sextet of forwards from Lynch, Hegarty, Morrissey, Hayes, Gillane, Flanagan, Mulcahy and a mid-season returning Peter Casey provides a world of possibilities once qualification has been secured.
The chance then exists to change the narrative around the oppositionâs obsession with Lynch by using a battering ram in Hayes at 11 and Lynch in a free role with Hegarty taking up temporary residence on the edge of the square. All free to revert to normality once damage is done.
Much of Waterfordâs focus will have been on the performance of Diarmuid Byrnes. I spent lots of my winter looking at Limerick from behind the goal and Byrnesâ zonal play is hugely influential. The first outlet as a fourth in the full-back line for Nickie Quaid on many puckouts, he generally leaves his half forward forage deep down the field. Tracking wing forwards like Morrissey or Hegarty, and often Darragh Oâ Donovan, ensure ample cover.
The Waterford 12 may play more of a âlie upâ role to avoid the concession of long-range points to Byrnes, or the Limerick man may be monitored from behind by the 15.
Or Bevans may consider matching Byrnes with Austin, a player Limerick know they cannot leave free at any stage.
Of course the focus on Byrnes means the genius of Kinnerk will be on high alert. This week Byrnesâ focus could be on shutting down his direct opponent and working like a dog for the team.
- The trilogy begins?
Limerickâs mood and intent was obvious on Sunday, a team highly motivated where metrics and passion were perfectly fused. The immediate focus post-match was on a performance for the âpeople of the Gaelic Groundsâ. Equally as impressive was the mental strength and resolve shown by Waterford to push back a ravenous Tipperary, cope with expectancy, defy the initial sense they were underperforming, and to begin to flow coming down the stretch.
I firmly believe that tomorrow evening will be the first of three meetings between these two teams. Waterfordâs need to lay down a championship marker against Limerick echoes Aragornâs famous speech at the Black Gate in Tolkienâs trilogy. âThis day we fight,â he declared. Waterford can fight their way to a precious two points.
This crystal ball could see Limerick attain a level of revenge in the Munster Final before the trilogy is completed with victory for ourselves on the 24th of July. Then Tolkienâs words will be even more telling: âThe crownless again shall be Kingâ
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I look forward to Royâs ode to JJ Bowles and the Woodfield House.
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Iâd agree with a lot of that. Tomorrow night is a big game for Waterford, they need to beat us or at least run us close. We can recover from it, but I think a bad beating would be the end of the blaaâs season mentally. We will want to beat them and beat them badly to break them.
Should be a cracker. 35k tickets sold already. Weather shaping up promising, into town after. Only problem will be getting a pint.
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The ârunning into grassâ bit was very pertinent.
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Donal Og swinging for the fences with his predictions
https://www.rte.ie/sport/gaa/2022/0422/1293642-donal-og-cusacks-hurling-predictions/
Joe Canning: I loved having a chip on the shoulder, I wanted it
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Writing off Limerick after the league campaign will have motivated them even more
about 2 hours ago
Nickie Quaid is the best in the business at making the right decisions under pressure and he is absolutely critical to how they play. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho
Afew weeks ago, I was working in the bar one of the Sundays during the league. A few lads were in and they were talking away about how this team was really going for the league and how that team was taking it handy and all this stuff. Limerick arenât the same after losing so many matches, etc. After a while, I stopped them and asked a question.
âTell me this â who won the league last year?â
Blank faces all round. They hadnât a clue.
I had to break it to them that Galway shared it with Kilkenny. But they basically made my point for me. Nobody loses any sleep over who wins or doesnât win the league. Itâs not that it doesnât mean anything - it means different things to different teams.
Limerick went through the early months of the year getting beaten in the league, Waterford went through it blowing through nearly everyone they met. But on the first day of championship, Limerick blitzed Cork and Waterford had to dig deep to get past Tipperary. The league is there to try things. The championship is where you find out if they work.
Waterford looked like a team that had been hindered by expectation. They found it tough to get going in the first half. They were tight and nervous looking. They werenât playing with the freedom they had in the league.
Why not? I personally think expectation has a lot to do with it. When you have the whole county telling you youâre great, when you have your former manager Derek McGrath being so bullish that this is going to be your year and that youâre the team to beat, it becomes very difficult to block it all out and focus on the job.
No matter where you are as a GAA player, you always, always hear that stuff. Itâs impossible to keep it out. If youâre the manager of a team thatâs in with a chance of winning an All-Ireland, youâre nearly better off if the stuff in the media is negative rather than positive. You want your players setting out to prove the bad stuff wrong rather than getting their head turned by the good stuff.
In 2009, Portumna played Ballyhale Shamrocks in the All-Ireland club semi-final in Thurles. We went into the game as defending All-Ireland champions and we felt we were in good form going into it. But when we saw the odds for the game, we found that we were underdogs. A lot of the media went for Ballyhale too.
Enraged
We were going mad. Like it or not, we spoke about that before the game. We are All-Ireland champions, weâve won it twice in three years and still weâre the outsiders? No way. It didnât make sense to us. And ultimately, it had a huge impact on our performance.
You obviously donât try any harder to win just because youâre annoyed. But the effect of it is that your focus on the job and on the game plan gets wound in that little bit tighter. You snap right into it because you have a chip on your shoulder. You leave nothing to chance.
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Joe Canning in action for Galway in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Clare at Semple Stadium in July 2016. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho
Iâd say John Kiely was laughing to himself in the past few weeks when he heard some people questioning Limerickâs form. Even the disciplinary stuff with the sendings-off and people giving out that they go too far physically. Kiely would have been thinking, âBring it on, the more of it the betterâ. Anything to give his players that edge, to make them think that people were doubting them.
I still have a picture on my phone of the headline on a match report from a league game Galway played in 2017. We lost to Wexford in Salthill in Division 1B and the headline read: âFitzgeraldâs charges lay down marker as Galway flops blow six-point leadâ. A league game in February and we were getting called flops in a national newspaper.
As it happened, we didnât lose a game for the rest of the year. We won the league, we won Leinster, we won the All-Ireland. Did getting called flops in February feed into that? It did for me anyway. I kept that on my phone as a reminder of what people thought of us. I still have it, five years later. The abuse we got walking off the pitch that night was something MicheĂĄl Donoghue referenced as the year went on too.
I loved having that chip on the shoulder. I wanted it. In 2017, I was coming back from a really bad injury - I had torn my hamstring tendon off the bone in the All-Ireland semi-final against Tipperary. At the start of that 2017 league, someone sent me a clip of a piece written by Jackie Cahill in The42 headlined: âNine players with big points to prove in the Allianz Hurling Leagueâ.
I started looking down through it and I saw Patrick Horganâs name on it and I was going, âAh here, Patrick Horgan doesnât have to prove anything to anyoneâ. But then I kept scrolling and found that I was there too. I was coming back from a career-threatening injury. I had been out for the guts of seven months. And now I had a big point to prove? F**k Off!
Sometimes you donât have to go looking very far. Ger Loughnane gave it to us in 2016 after the Leinster Final loss to Kilkenny. He said we were made of nothing, that we had no guts and you could forget about us altogether. He called Donoghue Father Trendy â which we found hilarious but only after we beat his native Clare three weeks later. Before that Clare match, we used everything Loughnane said about us. I remember Davy Fitz not being one bit happy with the motivation we got out of it.
If I was in that Limerick camp over the past couple of months, Iâd have been loving every bit of it. Iâd nearly have been searching out the criticism, trying to find somebody who said Limerick are struggling. The worst thing you need to hear is people bigging you up and telling you youâre great. That can make the mind soft if you keep getting told youâre great.
Tactics
Tactically, I would love to see Waterford try something different and go man-for-man on Limerick. Push up 15 on 15. They almost certainly wonât because Tadhg de BĂșrcaâs role as a deep-lying centre back is such an integral part of how they set up. But the more I watch Limerick, the more it seems like madness to continually be giving them a free man in defence.
Watch Limerickâs touch work. They very rarely drop a ball. They very rarely give teams chances to turn them over. The key line of their team is GearĂłid Hegarty, Cian Lynch and Tom Morrissey and if a team could find a way to keep the ball away from them, they might have a chance against them.
Barry Nash started life as an attacker. He is accurate, quick and he thinks like a forward. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho
But one of the reasons those three guys are able to get on so much ball is that Limerick nearly always have a spare man coming out of defence with time and space to pick one of them out. Once you play an extra defender against them, you generally leave someone like Barry Nash all the room in the world to get on the ball and play the pass he wants. And remember, Barry Nash started life as an attacker. He is accurate, quick and he thinks like a forward.
So if Barry Nash is coming out with the ball, he will have Hegarty, Lynch and Morrissey all making runs. And because they are so dangerous, defenders have to go with them, leaving space in front of the full-forward line. Yes, Tadhg de BĂșrca will be there to cover across but if there is no pressure on Nash, he can just bypass him. Pressure out the field is the best help a marking defender can have.
Limerick just played around Cork last Sunday, even though Mark Coleman dropped off and Ger Millerick took Lynch. Was Coleman able to cut off the supply line to Kyle Hayes and Aaron Gillane? Not really. On top of that, Nash scored two points, Declan Hannon and Dan Morrissey got one and Diarmaid Byrnes was man-of-the-match with three from play. Thatâs seven points from out the field because Limerick always had a spare defender in space.
I know it isnât as simple as just going man-on-man on them. I know thereâs every chance they would annihilate you anyway. Their interplay is so good, their stick-work is so accurate and theyâre so long together that Paul Kinnerk would be very likely to figure it out. And of all the teams who might try it, Waterford are probably the last who would consider it because it goes totally against their way of playing.
But Iâm just not sure how you beat Limerick if you keep giving them a spare man in the pocket of the pitch where they launch all their attacks from.
They obviously work extremely hard on restarts, be it puck-outs or line-balls. When did you ever see four defenders setting up on their own 21 for a puck-out? By doing this they created so much space around their half-forward line for that first or second ball.
Nickie Quaid is the best in the business at making the right decisions under pressure and he is absolutely critical to how they play. To me, he is Limerickâs most important player and their most under-rated. Everything flows from the Limerick puck-out and for that to work, they need someone who isnât going to get ruffled, who is calm under pressure, who can make the right decision every time.
You never see Limerick doing that routine of goalkeeper pasing to a defender, back to the goalkeeper and then just launching it long down into the opposition full-forward line. Why not? Because as soon as the opposition defence sees the ball going back to the goalkeeper, they think heâs going to hit it long and so they all congregate around the D, ready to fight for the breaking ball. I lost count of the amount of times that happened in the Wexford v Galway game but Limerick are far too well-drilled for that.
They engage the brain and think differently. Look how SeĂĄn Finn just turned and picked out Hegarty making a run across the 65 last Sunday. A quick 50-yard pass to Hegarty and bang, a point. Simple and efficient. It was definitely something they worked on in training. Cork were expecting the long ball, instead they played it short and scored easily.
Itâs going to be a fascinating game. Waterfordâs forwards will work harder than Corkâs did. They wonât get bullied like Corkâs did. Dessie Hutchinson wonât be bullied, Shane Bennett can handle himself, Neil Montgomery wonât get pushed around the way the Cork forwards did. Austin Gleeson, if picked, wonât be walked all over. Waterford have hardier boys in general and they wonât concede that ground to Limerick.
But in the end, that spare player coming out of the Limerick defence is going to be very hard for Waterford to stop, given how they like to set up. It could make all the difference.
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