Looking forward to this tomorrow, at least you can be guaranteed the Kilkenny lads won’t be whinging about any hits that go in win, lose or draw. They’ll get on with it.
Are you bringing the kids?
I’ve seen the selected team and subs and I don’t see Iron Mike Jnr. He certainly started a few league games and had a bonanza evening hitting frees for sport. Story? Not up to it? Do tell…
Nope, either too young or no interest.
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It’s hard to make the Limerick bench these days.
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Slippery ball tomorrow.
Advantage Limerick………
It’ll suit their running game
They’ll be putting top and back spin on their hand passes.
It’ll be unreal….
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Top spin and back hands
Who’s the ref again?
Will we keep the ball pucked out to them today?
Limerick are training at 9 this morning.
Anyone able.to paste up?
We will.
It’ll be battle royal on the 40 between Huw and Lynch.
I was wondering about Huw at 6 but I’ve a feeling Lynch is going to get marked properly today for the first time in his life.
We’ll see Lynch scampering out past midfield looking for scraps of ball in the rain.
Unfortunately it may boil down to the subs bench and Limerick will brazen a win.
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Limerick ace Cian Lynch is a modern-day hurling maverick
The Patrickswell man that carries a frathouse languor persona but pulls the strings for one of the greatest teams in history
Limerick hurler Cian Lynch poses with the Liam MacCarty cup. Photo: Sportsfile
April 08 2023 02:30 AM
In the 10 minutes it took Tipperary to go from a position of absolute dominance to Liam Sheedy commissioning search parties during the 2021 Munster final, the intelligence of one man’s game superseded all the noise.
Maybe the easiest mistake to make with Limerick is to fall for an idea that their play fits only one, specific contour.
It doesn’t.
How could it with Cian Lynch pulling the cables? Watch him through that 10 minutes of what amounts to psychological slaughter and you see the copyright of genius.
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Limerick score 1-5 to Tipp’s 0-1 in that small pocket of time, the Patrickswell man’s fingerprints directly traceable to 1-4. From 10 points up at half-time, Tipp suddenly find themselves entangled in a nightmare.
If their hope is that a 46th-minute Jake Morris point might somehow reset the emotional balance, what happens next proves ruinous.
For Lynch rises highest to pull Nickie Quaid’s puckout from the heavens, Dan McCormack duly fouling. Aaron Gillane nails the free, after which Limerick get the next six scores, culminating in a 54th-minute Kyle Hayes wonder goal to effectively end the contest.
And the trigger for Hayes’s lung-burning 70-yard surge? A sublime Lynch offload.
Given the injury woes that, essentially, kept him on the periphery of Limerick’s 2022 season, it is to ’21 that we must return for a measure of what Limerick now gain by Lynch’s restoration to full health. He was declared Man of the Match that day in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and again, little more than a month later, as Limerick eviscerated Cork in the All-Ireland final.
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Lynch’s personal tally of 0-6 from play against the Rebels proved just the outer casing on a performance of such profound influence it would secure him a second ‘Hurler of the Year’ award by the age of 25 (the first man to do so).
Both of Gearóid Hegarty’s goals in that final arrived after trademark Lynch flicks from the left wing, Cork’s defensive structure hopelessly corrupted by the unscripted movement of the green number 11.
JJ Delaney has described Lynch as “a street hurler”, someone so gifted that their inclination is to eschew the plain orthodoxies of the game. “He wouldn’t want to rise the ball, he’d want to flick it up and do something different with it” suggested Delaney.
And that, undeniably, is the most visible side of Cian Lynch. The quicksilver wrists, that lovely tactile relish of possession, the free-wheeling movement eternally buying invisible time. In other words, the sense of a hurling maverick.
Off the field, he carries a kind of frathouse languor too with alternating hair styles and colours, a baseball cap worn back-to-front and a smile inclined to flame to the lightest trigger. But if Lynch’s appearance always catches the eye, he is no popinjay.
Having the presumption to try something different sometimes draws old-school grumbles in hurling, where the traditional preference is for reticent, homogeneous personalities.
But Lynch’s natural sense of showtime comes married to plainer, starker qualities. That 2021 Championship was Brendan Maher’s last in a Tipperary jersey and, for him, the man who did most to lead Limerick back from the brink in that Munster final was broadly unrecognisable from someone who had been his direct midfield opponent in the summer of 2016.
“Back then, I remember thinking that the way to negate him was to get physical with him” remembers the Borris-Ileigh man now.
“But try to do that today and it’s a different ball-game.
“Cian’s skill level was never in doubt, but you can see that what’s setting him apart today is that he’s gotten an awful lot stronger. His ability to win primary possession I’d say is now the key difference between where he is today and where he would have been in his early 20s.
“If you think of the second half of that Munster final (2021) in particular, he won a couple of balls from puckouts and you wouldn’t previously have associated Cian Lynch with catching high balls, or the dirty ball as we call it.
“I now almost equate him to TJ’s influence in Kilkenny in that he’s able to win his own ball, bring other lads into play, but he’s also scoring three or four points from play most games. So it’s almost the perfect balance you want from a centre-forward. There’s nothing missing in his game now.”
Lynch himself reckons that he was no more than a 73kg when first stepping into a Limerick senior dressing-room. He has a conspicuously broader frame now, thanks to the S&C guidance of Joe O’Connor and, as Cian himself grins, “a few extra dinners”.
In the modern story of Limerick hurling, the 2019 All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Kilkenny is remembered as a galling aberration of sorts. A game lost to the Cats’ early ferocity, wayward Limerick shooting coming down the track and, of course, the ‘65’ that should have been. Yet when asked if there is one result in his hurling career that he still aches to change, Lynch is inclined to pick another Kilkenny defeat.
Limerick’s team beaten in the 2014 All-Ireland minor final was considered the county’s best ever with a sextet in attack of Lynch, Seamus Flanagan, Tom Morrissey, Barry Nash, Peter Casey and Ronan Lynch. Seán Finn played at right corner-back. Gillane could not even make the match-day 24.
To this day, that side in 2014 is remembered as one that simply fell to the curse of over-confidence.
No matter. By then, the trajectory for Lynch especially was never in much doubt. A 15-year-old Harty Cup winner with Ardscoil Rís in 2011; captain when the school won again in 2014; Munster minor medals with Limerick in ’13 and ’14 and an All-Ireland U-21 medal in 2015.
He won two Fitzgibbons with Mary Immaculate College too, the second under the baton of Jamie Wall, who has likened him to the famous Barcelona footballer, Xavi.
Referencing Lynch’s awareness of everything around him on a hurling field, Wall challenges the idea of Lynch as some kind of free-wheeling individualist though.
“He has this reputation as a maverick talent” Wall said recently. “But he is in one of the most system-oriented teams and he is a huge part of that system.”
It is an observation that maybe brings us closer to a general truth about the modern Limerick too. To the fact that their hurling is less about structure than connection.
After that 2019 loss to Kilkenny, Lynch spoke to ‘Off The Ball’ about the perception of them as a hurling team deploying football tactics.
“I think a lot of people look into it too much and try to analyse the whole thing, break it down to the smallest detail,” he reflected. “I suppose evolution is huge. When hurling evolves, so does the thought process and so does the way the game has to be played.
“But a lot of it is instinct too, like. You still have to make decisions on the spot.”
A teetotaller and weekly Mass-goer, Lynch turned 27 in January and has –for Limerick’s opponents – become an almost unsolvable problem. Within Limerick, an idea holds that his confinement to an orthodox midfield role in 2019 made it easier for Kilkenny to subdue him with a specific man-marker. As a notional centre-forward with licence to roam, opponents now have to decide whether to play a sitting centre-back or take the risk of delegating him to follow.
Maher believes “it’s a bit scary for the rest of us” that Lynch and his half-forward colleagues, Tom Morrissey and Gearóid Hegarty, are now all – age-wise – merely approaching their prime in the game.
“You look at Cian and just the leadership that he’s bringing now, something that wasn’t always there” says the Borris-Ileigh man. “And it’s a great sign of a fella who is oozing class and skill and technical ability when he says to himself, ‘Right I need to add this to my game if I’m going to be what I want to be!’
“You can be as physical as you like with him now and he’s able to cope with it. He’s able to take it and he’ll never react. No more than any other marquee forward, he gets lots of attention now.
“But he’s such a calm person, he just plays his game, wins dirty ball, brings other guys into it and he’s picking off those three or four points from play every game, which is phenomenal.
“When Cian is smiling and almost having a laugh on the pitch, that’s when you know he’s at his most dangerous. You can see how much he’s enjoying it out there and I’m sure that has a calming influence on those around him out there. Because you should never underestimate what that does for others.
“When you see a guy like that getting the ball and it looks like he’s got all the time in the day to pick his pass . . . Noel McGrath can be a bit like that for us. I remember from my own experience just seeing Noel look so calm on the ball, you’d nearly relax yourself.
“That’s the impact these special players can have on those around them.”
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Into Kent for 10:30?
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Are you for real?
They wouldn’t be caught dead on a train… A fleet of choppers are leaving Martinstown at 12.25pm. cc @flattythehurdler
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A team of choppers is right.