At about 12.50pm today i got a mad rush of blood to the head and decided to abandon my principles and take in some Split season, Round Robin blitz type hurling. Ennis was out of the question due to the timing of it, so i pointed the car for Thurles.
My God where do you start with it? I think the GAA are playing 4D chess with us and have realised the hurling is shit, so they’ll get the officials to jizz the thing up a bit. I had previously thought Liam Gordon was a generally inoffensive, okish ref, but that was Diarmuid Kirwan 2009 levels of incompetence today.
Control was lost when he allowed the Limerick goal stand with Tadhg De Burca riding around the ground in the pain. He might have salvaged the situation if he sent off Dessie Hutchinson (the game would have been effectively over then and probably fizzled out ) but from then on it was open season and just got worse for the officials.
Flanagan… I mean ffs. Not his first rodeo and there was no mitigation there. He wasn’t even looking at the ball. Nasty business.
What can you even say about Hegarty? Awful “tackle” which should have been a straight red and made a show of himself afterwards. Nash (who is the best player they have by a mile) could and should have walked too. They could easily have finished with 12.
Dessie could have walked too possibly and Kyle Hayes may well have picked up a harsh yellow (Mikey Kiely was trying to stop his run off the ball from what i could see) but Limerick by and large benefitted hugely from the referee today. Even the yellow for Mark Fitzgerald was an absolute joke. It was barely even a free. They got a penalty that was a blatant square ball and Waterford had a point disallowed rather bizarrely too.
Limerick’s hurling isnt that good either. Thats three times I’ve seen them in the flesh in the past 12 months and I’ve been really underwhelmed each time. They needed the bell on each occasion v Galway and Kilkenny last year and again today. Talks of them being on the same level as Kilkenny or Tipp in the 2009-2016 period is cloud cuckoo land stuff. Barry Nash is an absolutely brilliant player though and you’d go to war with the Morrissey’s and Byrnes.
Waterford really out-Waterford themselves today. Completely overthought it early on and only when they decomplicated things did they realise they were every bit as good as the Limerick’s. Dominated in most areas (Calum Lyons was unreal) but some of the misses were unforgivable. Bennetts free and some of Dessie’s wides being the most obvious ones.
If they’d brought on Patrick Fitzgerald 10 minutes earlier they’d probably have won.
Anyhow i got away quick after the match and was home for 4.02pm. Tipp were already 1-03 to no score up when i parked up my car, so i proceeded to my evenings work safe in the knowledge, business was being taken care of in Ennis.
