Hurling is much the better for Dublinâs development. it pisses me off though when people go on about how great it would be for hurling if dublin won the all ireland. what hurling needs is more counties being genuine contenders and personally it does not matter whether it is dublin, laois, limerick wexford etc winning the all ireland. i love hurling but any sport dominated by one or two teams is not healthy.
I think the hope is that a Dublin win would create such media hype that it might give hurling a bit of a lift everywhere. Wishful thinking Iâd say though.
thats the theory alright
One more point - Dublin have definitely shown the prototype that needs to be followed to become a genuine contender. A lot of traditional counties could learn an awful lot by examine this and replicating it in their own counties as it is obviously best practice.
the current kilkenny team is the greatest team i have ever seen but great team and great players cannot go on forever. I believe that the current tipp team is exceptional with potential for greatest but as they lose some of their senior players they may regress from the heights of last year.
i just get a feeling that these two could be coming back to the pack slightly based on what i have seen so far this year and therein lies the hope for the rest of us.
Kilkenny are definitely coming back to the pack and the age profile of some of Tipppâs key players means they will in the near future.
Kelly, Corbett, Cummins, Curran and OâBrien are not long term options for them and whoever they bring in in the forwards are simply not going to be as good as Kelly and Corbett.
thats what i would be thinking aswell.
Another way of looking at this though is that Tippâs younger players arenât even near their prime yet so as Kelly and Corbett fall away Pauric Maher and Noel McGrath keep getting better for another 5 years.
the difference is that kelly and corbett are two of the greatest forwards to have played the game and its very difficult to replace such players. You saw last year in all ireland final what a loss of one great forward was to a great team. to lose two such forwards would be massive.
I know where youâre coming from, Fagan, I used to think about that as well. Itâs actually a pretty flimsy theory though. Clare didnât come and win it in one year. They lost two Munster U21 finals in '92 and '94, and won a Junior All Ireland in '93. More importantly, they contested and lost the '93 and '94 Munster finals. So when we won it, it was more like the third year than the first in terms of the teamâs development. Wexford were even longer coming to the boil. They lost the '92, '93, and '94 finals, as well as the epic '93 league final(s). Itâs easy to think otherwise from outside the county but thereâs always a process. Even Tipp took three full years to get there, and the spine of that team had the disastrous Babs years as well.
I take the point which is a fair one. Dublin did nt get here overnight either. However when the momentum carried these teams to an All Ireland semi final or final as the case may be they went on and won it the first year or they never won it v[quote=âWatch The Break, post: 593359â]
I know where youâre coming from, Fagan, I used to think about that as well. Itâs actually a pretty flimsy theory though. Clare didnât come and win it in one year. They lost two Munster U21 finals in '92 and '94, and won a Junior All Ireland in '93. More importantly, they contested and lost the '93 and '94 Munster finals. So when we won it, it was more like the third year than the first in terms of the teamâs development. Wexford were even longer coming to the boil. They lost the '92, '93, and '94 finals, as well as the epic '93 league final(s). Itâs easy to think otherwise from outside the county but thereâs always a process. Even Tipp took three full years to get there, and the spine of that team had the disastrous Babs years as well.
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Iâm finding it difficult to think of a ânewâ team that came along and won an All-Ireland straight away in either hurling or football Meath 1996 maybe.
Dublin havenât even won Leinster yet though. They wouldnât have got to a semi-final yet either under the old system. If they did you could nearly guarantee theyâd be in the final. Iâd nearly look at it in a different way. It would have been great encouragement to Clare if the backdoor system had been in place back then, not to mention the last seventies where we had another team well capable of winning the All Ireland. It takes the pressure off, and gives the setup the oxygen of an All Ireland semi-final. The horizons are much broader for Dublin now than they were for us. We were just obsessed with, and at the same time terrified of, Munster finals. For 63 years they haunted us and we never saw Croke Park. Had we got those days and fell short I donât think it would have hurt us, if anything it would have given us more confidence. Ultimately Dublin will win it if they are good enough, and I wouldnât place too much emphasis on momentum or timing or anything else. The team is not the finished article and all that should be on the agenda is correcting that, and whether Daly is the man to do it.
Cork 1999 as well obviously
How ânewâ were Cork in 1990? They werenât given much hope anyway were they?
Cork are different though. Theyâre like magic mushrooms.
Not very. They had most of the backbone of the 1986 team in place still eg Cunningham, Jim Cashman, Teddy McCarthy, Tomas Mulchay, Tony OâSullivan and all of the full forward line. They were supplemeted by a few new players like Mark Foley They had been absolute cat in '88 and '89. Charlie McCarthy was manager. Waterford beat them in a replay in '89. It must have been largely down to poor organisation that they were so bad in those years.
They only look to have a lone stalk coming through these days.
As a matter of interest that Cork team had won an under21 and had won the league in 1998.
They then had the misfortune to run into the most complete performance of hurling ever given by a Clare team. I honestly thought Brian Corcoran was going to collapse that day he was run that ragged. Of course that was the last game before the madness consumed Clare.
But that is based on the assumption that Maher and McGrath are going to keep on improving, they are already operating at a very high level and I donât there is much more in terms of improvement to come from either. It is not like that there are huge deficiencies in their games to iron out to improve them further