I know that KK were trying there best but if they reproduce that same level of performance then I fear for them v Tipp in the final. Tj really needs to find a bit of form in the B&A jersey. I agree what was said earlier by CLD re: Tommy, just not himself at the minute, hopefully with Tipp in the final it can inspire him. Richie Hogan took his goals well but then did very little else.
Canât see beyond Tipp this year but unreal achievement for a county our size to get to our 6th ai in a row.
Yesterday was our [size=5]15th [/size]AI Semi in a row.
he has missed more hurling this year than any other year. that game will have brought him on loads. heâll be grand.
I one thing i have notice this year is that there is a serious lack of cohesiveness in the forwrad sextet. i put this down to richie hogan and colin fennelly. they are very greedy and more often than not will go for their own score rather than playing the correct ball.
it must be frustrating as hell for the other 4 forwards who are making the correct runs etc and not being given the ball. there must come a point when these lads think why bother?
I think gaelic games still have lots of scope for more tactical development. Tipperary are good at what they do but itâs not hugely revolutionary either in my opinion. Someone in a traditional full forward position drifting out and vacating the space and allowing Corbett or another player to arrive at pace into it is hardly rocket science. Like, there was no excuse for Waterford defenders to be jogging back 5 or 10 yards behind Corbett as he zone in on goal. Thatâs just really shit defending and a lack of concentration and commitment.
Without a doubt. I think it will happen more and more over the next 5-10 years as the best of the Paudie Butler generation of coaches come through. You still have a situation where a majority of coaches at club level have no interest in tactics and regard them as nonsense. It is essentially very anti-intellectual in nature and a great example of it recently was the furore over the number of cones being used in warm-ups. That anyone with any level of interest in thinking about a sport could hone in on that as significant contributor to performance shows how incredibly backward a certain section of the GAA community is.
Unlike football, or basketball, there is no GAA equivalent of a professional sphere out of which great ideas emerge. Instead it becomes a question of the right people coming along to take over intercounty teams at the right time (Loughnane, Cody, OâGrady, OâShea) and their innovations get popularised. The nature of competition is such that playing styles and attitudes to attacking play in particular will eventually become much more of an issue, but it will consistently be delayed and criticised by the old guard.
Youâre being extremely harsh on the Waterford backs by the way. What Tipperary do with respect to their off the ball running in particular is very much out of the ordinary and is very hard to deal with when the correct decisions are made further out the field. Anything which gives a team an advantage over the rest of the field for even one season is a big deal, and with Tipp it looks they will retain that advantage heading into a third. For 100 years defenders in hurling primarily played one position and dealt with ball that landed in their zone. Typically the ball being delivered was at best 60-40 to the forward which placed an emphasis on a particular set of skills. Tipp have changed that in a big way.
[quote=âWatch The Break, post: 592995â]Youâre being extremely harsh on the Waterford backs by the way. What Tipperary do with respect to their off the ball running in particular is very much out of the ordinary and is very hard to deal with when the correct decisions are made further out the field. Anything which gives a team an advantage over the rest of the field for even one season is a big deal, and with Tipp it looks they will retain that advantage heading into a third. For 100 years defenders in hurling primarily played one position and dealt with ball that landed in their zone. Typically the ball being delivered was at best 60-40 to the forward which placed an emphasis on a particular set of skills. Tipp have changed that in a big way.
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Maybe I was being overly harsh but I was seething watching Waterford defend that day. I take your point that the style of delivery to the forwards has changed but I donât think it should be proving so difficult for defences to adapt to it. Interesting point when you refer to the lack of a professional sphere for new innovations to emerge like what occurs in other sports and I think youâre onto something there.
Iâd equate Tipperaryâs attacking method somewhat to movement seen in association football though this may be seen as a bizarre comment by others; e.g. âthe false nineâ (as pioneered by Spallettiâs Roma when Totti played the role even though Barcelona get undeserved credit for doing it with Messi) where a soccer teamâs centre forward drops into midfield and the centre backs donât necessarily have anyone to mark and donât know whether to follow him out or hold position and get caught between two stools as attackers pour forward from deeper positions. Thatâs essentially what Tipperary do with their full forward line on occasion. Waterford decided to mark man to man and follow attackers, got dragged all over the place, left the danger area vacant for onrushing attackers and were destroyed.
The method of many of Tipperaryâs scores remind me a lot of third man runs in soccer too; e.g. A (a half back or midfielder) plays the ball to B (an advanced attacker, say Eoin Kelly) and he lays the ball off to C, the third man, arriving at pace (another attacker coming from deeper, say Corbett). Itâs similar to a ball played into a strikerâs feet and he either holds it and lays it off for a team-mate arriving at pace to shoot or touches it first time into his path or whatever. Like how Scholes or someone got lots of goals arriving onto the ball.
As you say, this is completely different to the old school drive the ball down the field where defender and attacker stand under it and duel for it but I think teams should surely have better awareness of what Tipperary are doing. I think in some respects the failure of teams to respond to it shows how tactically deficient some set ups are. Speaking from a Wexford perspective, our senior team had no discernible tactics ourselves or appreciation of what the opposition were doing over the past few years. I think itâs fairly ridiculous.
this is a very good topic gentlemen.
The reference to the professional sphere is interesting but omits one key factor that differentiates hurling from professional sports. The number of games. Guardiola, Spaletti, Graham Taylor or the other tactical innovators of the modern era didnât hit on the right formula overnight and stick with it. They had 40-50 game seasons to evolve the tactical set up. If a tactic proved to be disastrous they lost the game and moved on.
Hurling teams do not have that luxury. Whatever the fuck Waterford were trying out against Tipp (will we ever know?) had to be abandoned pronto for the Galway game two weeks later or the season was over. Most hurling teams get 2-3 games a year to try out a tactical formation, the good ones get 4 and the top teams might get 5. You arenât going to develop a new paradigm in that timeframe. So most teams still opt for 3-3-2-3-3 or 3-3-3-3-2.
The great example of this was Cyril Farrellâs tactical wheeze in the 1986 All Ireland semi final when he played Pearse Piggott at number 13 and had him play as a third midfielder. Although the tactic was being used in football Kilkenny had never encountered it before and an aging Paddy Prendergast followed Piggott around the field for the day like an eejit and Kilkenny were destroyed by the space they left inside. However for the final Corkâs Johnny Crowley simply sat in his position and belted clearance after clearance away. Galway had no plan B and had to revert to 3-3-2-3-3 at half time. If Galway had had a few games to work out the tactic they might have encountered this difficulty and devised a way around it.
That said the back door has seen a shift towards tactical innovation that wasnât there in the one strike and youâre out days but the system is still set up for conservatism.
Another key difference from the pro sphere is that counties typically have to play with the players they have. They canât devise a system and then get the players that suit the system. So the system is dictated by the players available rather than the other way around. If Cork had had two or three physically imposing forwards there would have been no short passing or quick puck out game. And Kilkenny would then have had no need to develop a high tackling smothering style of defence. Similarly if Tipp had a big strapping full forward they wouldnât be to worried about rotating forwards and diagonal balls. They donât (and probably never will again because of the tyranny of the development squad system - but thatâs a rant for another day).
the beauty of hurling is in its simplicity
Is there enough material for a book to be written on the tactical history of Gaelic football and/or hurling ala Jonathan Wilsonâs âInverting the Pyramidâ?
Great post. What do you mean by the last bit though?
Unreal that it took until 1986 for someone to try the âthird midfielderâ masterstroke in hurling!
Kevin Heffernan and Dublin footballers in 1983 were the pioneers of this amazing new tactic.
A half forward running on to breaking ball in the full forward line is hardly ground-breaking in the game of hurling is it?
It is in Wexford.
Not particularly, although the full forward line is the source of most of the Tipperary goals.
didnât Mark O leary score 2 goals in all-ireland final back in 2001 from running from half forward onto balls declan ryan laid off to himâŚ
I think the speed and precision of this Tipperary sideâs forward unit is more advanced than anything that went before. Still though, I also reckon teams should have come up with better attempts to stifle them. I expect Kilkenny to simply revert to their usual methods involving swinging hurls towards the neck area and sly belts to the hand.
its true corbett is almost impossible to mark with his movementâŚseamus callanan tooâŚkk wonât be able to catch them to break em upâŚ
They aimed more for the genital area yesterday as Noel Connors can attest. Tom Kenny has a lot to answer for in encouraging them in this regard.
Gola
I think the development squad system is slowly suffocating hurling. A county picks 60 youngsters at age 14 and effectively works with that bunch until they are minors.
All of those players in all of the counties then work off what are in effect centrally devised coaching programmes. The net result is that all counties coach the same skills the same way.
There are two detrimental aspects to this. First the obvious one. There is no role for a maverick player in this set up. All that madness is coached out of a player by the time the player is 18. I seriously doubt whether a player with the skill set of a Ciaran Carey or a Ken McGrath would ever make it through that system with the skill set intact. There is no room for instinctive striking when you are continually being coached repetitive striking drills in your formative years.
The second problem is that the system is designed to exclude late developers. Neither Lar Corbett nor John Mullane would have made it through the system because they were too small at age 14 to be any use to a county intent on winning the Tony Forristal. And if you are outside this system you tend to remain outside it. That tends to exclude two types of player the small quick chap and the big strapping lad who typically develops late because he is too busy growing into his body at age 14. Christy Heffernan would be a great example here.
Itâs quite possible to mark Lar Corbett. I seriously doubt that he ever scored 4-4 in the Mid Tipp championship or anything like it. Itâs that Tipp are very adept at making space for him to use his pace and other counties canât figure out how to plug the gaps [quote=âscumpot, post: 593007â]
its true corbett is almost impossible to mark with his movementâŚseamus callanan tooâŚkk wonât be able to catch them to break em upâŚ
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