Does he do a bit in the Lodge?
Hard to know how Clare and Tipp will go this weekend. Was last week a fair reflection as to where they are at or was it a case of them coming in with no expectations and a chip on their shoulder and playing above themselves? So will be interesting do they make changes and will they hit the same levels they did in the first half v Waterford.
It is still a strong enough Tipp team on paper, albeit with a lot of good hurlers but lacking the totem figures/match winners in the Mahers, Callinan and when in the mood Bubbles.
Clare will have gotten a good look at Tipp last week and i doubt Tipp will make too many changes in personnel or approach. Iâd expect Dan McCormack to start in midfield though. Clare will most likely play Cathal Malone midfield and have him sit in the space where Noel Mcgrath will look to drop into allowing Conlon to hold the middle at centre back.
Cathal Barrett did a solid job on Kelly last year and I would assume Tipp will look to try and repeat that trick again on Sunday. With that in mind I would think Clare will start Kelly at left half forward on top of Dylan Quirke and see how Tipp want to rearrange to man mark Kelly.
Clare struggled to get ball into Kelly last year and when they did Barrett was touch tight and gave him no room. With Kelly wing forward and a far more athletic looking middle third compared to last years meeting I think Kelly will have freedom to move and Clare will give him the ability for him to play off the shoulder off the likes of Malone, Ryan, Taylor, David Mc, Fitzgerald, OâDonnell etc carrying ball which wasnât an option last year with him playing close to goal.
I think Forde suits Flanagan as he doesnât have the pace to really get at him. The other two battles inside will be key, Rory Hayes has become a really tight and tigerish corner back and will match up with Jake Morris while Conor Cleary is an utter rash at full back and will look to maul and muscle Kehoe all day long. Kehoe looked very good last weekend, will be interesting to see can he repeat it.
I think having six weeks run into this and there is very little talk about them. Lohan has been good in relation to getting workrate and attitude out of the team in championship, although we still make an awful lot of unforced errors with the ball which are killer at times and a team like Tipp will gladly punish.
The likes of David Mc, Jason McCarthy and David Fitz all finished the league showing a bit of form but it is hard to really be confident that they will fire given past performances. While Duggan and OâDonnell are coming in cold and they are as likely to be two of the first players subbed as they are to perform come Sunday so it is hard to have real confidence that Clare will win but I think they are capable of getting a result. They will need at least three of those 5 to play well on Sunday and it is a big ask.
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I was going to post up this one, his notes on Quaid and Nash are spot on.
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I fancy ye to take them
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Thatâs a good piece by Joe, kudos for the little digs at Derek McGrath and Jackie Cahill also.
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Someone was talking about that routine teams do where teams go from puckout to full-back back to the goalkeeper and he launches it, and I was thinking yesterday that Limerick never ever do that really.
Joe says the same. I donât think the routine is totally worthless but it can be a bit predictable. Iâd love to see someone do it but instead of all the half-forwards & midfield converging on the D, they all start to make a move back towards the ball. If the keeper has a good head, heâll be able to pick one out if the backs have started to drop back.
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This weekend from a neutral point of view really brings home what a mess the championship has been made.
If it was straight knock out Waterford would really fancy taking out Limerick and Sunday morning pretty much every team would fancy winning another all Ireland.
The way it is you are probably looking at 2-3 more intriguing games for the rest off the year.
Itâs a real shame. The sky sports deal, the shambles off a championship structure and the ticket fiasco with centra has ruined a lot of the buzz for me.
Weâll likely never see a period like the 90s and early 00s when it was truly wide open. In the next 20-30 years Iâm predicting weâll see a lot off 2 in a rows and 3 in a rows from the stronger counties whoâll have the resources to blow other counties out of the water.
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It was noticeable watching the 20s the other night just how little ball we launch at senior. Stood out to me how the men in green were playing ball from first third and it being 50/50 ball to final third so much more than we see at senior.
It truly is incredible the cohesion and skill level created at the top table
Even if you are driving it, you should have an idea of where you want it to land. Like landing a ball on top of an isolated full-forward is still a valid tactic but to give him a chance, you donât want to make it a defenderâs ball.
I think the days of just blindly hitting it are gone for every team tbh, but some teams are just better at it than others.
The Limerick way.
The Hawker is setting up the stallâŚ
The Limerick crowd would sicken your shit with all their fancy talk about puck out strategies.
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Theyâve the pub in Portumna anyway and sure doesnât he have his hand in a few restaurants and that around the place?
Just give the ball to the man in the best position. Itâs not rocket science.
Appreciate that, great piece. Youâd hardly be able to post his article from last week?
One man, one ball.
Joe Canning: âYou canât beat Limerick playing like Limerickâ
Last Updated: Saturday, April 16, 2022, 06:00
Iâm a hypocrite. Iâll admit that from that start.
During my playing career â and throughout the latter part of it especially â I wouldnât have had the greatest relationship with the media. Iâd say there are journalists looking at my name at the top of a newspaper article and thinking, âOh, so now he has something to say?â The truth is, Iâm nearly as surprised to find myself here as they are.
I tried to steer clear from media stuff most of the time when I was playing. I know maybe it looked like I was in the papers quite a bit at certain times of the year and there would have been a perception that I was out there all the time, talking away. But when it came down to it, I would say I only did about 20 per cent of what I was asked to do over the years. And yet here I am, writing a weekly column.
Perceptions inform a lot of things. People make assumptions about hurling based on lots of different perceptions. They see the scoring totals rising year after year â especially at inter-county level â and instead of applauding the skill and dedication and sheer work it takes to get them up to that level, they nearly dismiss it all.
Scoring rates keep rising because the best teams leave each other with no choice in the matter. Free-taking is part of it
Youâve heard all the arguments and explanations by now. The ball is lighter. The hurls are bigger. The refs give frees for anything and everything. True or not, relevant or not, they all feed into the same perception. The logic seems to be that if the scores are so high, it must be because itâs easy to score.
If it was easy, everyone would be able to do it. But everyone isnât. Scoring a point is the most natural thing in the world because itâs the first thing you really want to do when youâre a kid. As soon as youâre able to rise the ball and get a good strike on it, you try to put it between the posts. Thatâs natural. But it isnât easy.
Scoring rates keep rising because the best teams leave each other with no choice in the matter. Free-taking is part of it. If you miss two frees in an inter-county game these days, youâll be very lucky to get to hit a third one. If youâre facing a team that has Patrick Horgan or TJ Reid or Aaron Gillane or Stephen Bennett in it, you have no margin for error.
Team set-up is a factor as well. Look at Limerickâs defence â three of their key players started out life as forwards. Kyle Hayes, Declan Hannon and Barry Nash all spent their formative years as hurlers with only one thing in mind â to score as many points as possible.
Go back to the great Cork team of the early 2000s and their brilliant half-back line of John Gardiner, Ronan Curran and SeĂĄn Ăg Ă hAilpĂn. They were pure defenders, first and foremost. Thatâs what they were there for. Gardiner scored frees from distance and SeĂĄn Ăg got forward for the occasional score but they were out-and-out defenders. They were there to stop the opposition.
That isnât the case any more. The best teams want to see scores coming from everywhere. Joe Cooney came to prominence as a forward for Galway but he has developed further back the field. Jack Fagan is back playing wing-back for Waterford. Aussie Gleeson will pop up regularly in any position and drive on from there. You need to widen your spread of scorers or you will come up short eventually.
Nobody gives out to a corner-back for shooting now in the way they might have previously
Thatâs probably the biggest shift in the game over the past decade and a half. No matter who you are in the team now, you are expected to be able to take a score if it presents itself. If you think you can score, the right option is to take the shot, regardless of what number is on your back.
If youâre a forward at inter-county, youâd want to be confident of scoring from anywhere within 70 yards of the goal. If youâre not, then youâre not training hard enough or putting in enough practice with your shooting.
If youâre a back and you find yourself in that position, management will generally want you to take the shot. Nobody gives out to a corner-back for shooting now in the way they might have previously. Itâs not that theyâre okay with it going wide â theyâre not. But theyâd rather you took the shot than turned down a scoring chance. Big totals donât come from turning down opportunities.
Taking all this into account when youâre game-planning probably goes in the opposite direction to what most people think. I was never in a team meeting where we sat down and went, âWell, theyâre going to score 30 points so we have to score 31â. Thatâs not how it works.
What you do is you break it down and give yourself smaller things to focus on. If you get enough of those small things right, it hopefully builds up into a winning picture in the end. Very often itâs about what you can do to reduce their total rather than to raise your own.
So in your opposition analysis, the stats guys will give you heat maps of where the other teamâs scores tend to come from. What is the position on the field that they like to shoot from? Which players do they like to get into that position? What can we do to disrupt the way they play in that area of the pitch while at the same time implementing our own game plan?
In 2018, we played Clare in the All-Ireland semi-final. John Conlon had been immense for Clare all the way through that summer and was in the running for Hurler of the Year. One thing our stats guys had noticed was that Clare liked to vacate the 13 corner and thatâs where they would deliver ball from out the field for him to drift onto.
It may or may not have been a deliberate tactic on their part but there was a definite pattern there. He would go out towards that sideline and either take a shot himself or recycle it for someone else to shoot.
So ahead of the semi-final, that was a piece of information that our backs were able to use. It allowed our defenders to take a step towards that corner of the pitch when they were marking him. That sounds like a very small thing â just a step, nothing more. But itâs those very small things that add up and become crucial to the end result.
Think about it this way â John Conlon had scored 1-22 in six games before that semi-final. So he was averaging over four points a game. But over the course of two matches against us â including extra time the first day â DaithĂ Burke was able to hold him to a total of five points altogether. So DaithĂ basically cut his average in half. In the end, we won the replay by a point.
John Conlon: Galway worked on small details to reduce the Clare starâs potential scoring threat during the 2018 semi-final. They succeeded and managed to scrape a wafer-thin victory by one point in the replay. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
Was it the winning of the game? No. When two teams are only separated by a point after two games plus extra-time, you obviously need luck to go your way too. That replay came down to the width of a post late in the game and lucky for us, Aron Shanagher hit the outside of it rather than the inside. The margins are tiny at the elite level of sport. You try to turn as many of them in your favour as you can.
Limerick put up a record score in last yearâs All-Ireland final so thatâs what everyone has to aim at now. The question is how. Will it be, âThey scored 3-32 so we have to score 3-33â? I donât think it will. I donât think you can beat Limerick playing like Limerick. Someone else has to come up with something else.
Go back to the Kilkenny teams of the 2000s. The first version of them was beaten by Corkâs running game. The second version was beaten, eventually, by Tipperaryâs movement. Every team that tried to take them on physically or to ape their style of play only ended up playing into their hands.
You game-plan, you target certain areas, you prepare yourself properly. But when youâre out there and the ball is whizzing around, you canât force things
So look around the teams that are gearing up for the championship this weekend. Waterford are trying something different to what Limerick have been doing. Itâs all off-the-shoulder running, huge pace from deep, looking for gaps to create goals. Even Kilkenny are looking to adapt now as well, trying to play with more possession than before rather than just having every man fight for his ball.
One way or the other, the team that will give Limerick the biggest challenge will be the team that gets into a flow with whatever it is theyâre trying to implement. You canât go out and say, âWeâll try to score 1-11 in the first half and 1-14 in the second and that will see us over the lineâ. It has to be a more natural thing than that.
Sport is a place where you have to trust your instincts a lot of the time. You game-plan, you target certain areas, you prepare yourself properly. But when youâre out there and the ball is whizzing around, you canât force things. You play it as you see it.
Look at the best golfer in the world at the minute. A month and a half ago, Scottie Scheffler had never won a professional tournament on the PGA Tour. Now heâs won four times in six weeks and heâs the Masters champion.
He went into each of those tournaments with a plan for what he wanted to do but when the pressure was at its highest, he played each shot as it came naturally to him. It wasnât a case of needing to get to 10-under by the seventh hole or whatever else. Everything is just flowing for him now. Heâs not overthinking anything.
The best teams in the hurling championship will be the ones who can get themselves into a similar state. We know sitting here now that youâre probably going to need 30 points to win a lot of these games. But to get there, these teams will have to go about it ball-by-ball and score-by-score, doing what comes naturally. Sounds easy when itâs put like that.
It isnât.
Š 2022 irishtimes.com
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Iâd be amazed if the round robin nonsense lasts another 3 years to be honest.
Limerick ârestingâ Kyle Hayes for a championship game at the weekend tells you all you need to know about how irrelevant most of these games are.
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By God. Joe has just gone and turned the formula upside down. Instead of starting with it, his article finished with the tangential sporting analogy.
Game changer.
Good article tho. Obv ghostwriter involved but reads nice and simple; no need to over elaborate. The point on conlan interesting. Small differences can make all the difference
E Quilligan
R Hayes
C Cleary
P Flanagan
D Ryan
J Conlon
D McInerney
S Golden
C Malone
R Taylor
T Kelly
D Fitzgerald
P Duggan
S Meehan
I Galvin
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