WE DON’T PANIC
Morrissey duo help to banish bad habits as Treaty march on
IT only served to add to the sense of history, the fact that on a momentous day when Limerick revived memories of a glorious past by beating Kilkenny for the first time since the 1973 All-Ireland final, a pair of brothers would be shortlisted for the Man of the Match award.
Only Kilkenny goalkeeper Eoin Murphy gate-crashed the Limerick party when The Sunday Game shortlist was unveiled, by virtue of a selection of stunning saves that almost changed the course of this year’s hurling Championship.
In the end though, given the historical context attached to the result, it was always going to boil down to a choice between the Ahane duo Dan and Tom Morrissey.
When Limerick were most under pressure in the first half, with Kilkenny’s lead stretching to four points by the half-way point of it, 0-7 to 0-3, it was the half-back line of Diarmuid Byrnes, Declan Hannon and Dan Morrissey who brought their side thundering back into the match. The number seven’s fielding and distribution was superb throughout and his play seemed to light the touch paper on his brother’s contribution at wing-forward.
After Richie Hogan pounced for a late Kilkenny goal and just when it seemed like Kilkenny would continue the cycle of defeats since Limerick’s last AllIreland win 45 years ago, Tom Morrissey got the two biggest points of the game.
First he made a great catch, turned and scored to switch the momentum back towards Limerick. Then, after Peter Casey and Shane Dowling turned the screw, he responded to Richie Leahy’s equaliser with a dizzying run and point up the new stand sideline in injury time, the key score to close it out. Brothers gonna work it out. ‘We’ve great faith in each other as a team,’ explained older brother Dan, three years older at 25. ‘Even when Kilkenny got the goal with a few minutes to go, we didn’t panic. Limerick teams of old might have dropped the heads and let Kilkenny finish off the match, but we went down the field, won the next puck-out and put it over the bar.
‘You have days like that — I threw up the hand and some days you’d miss it completely, other days the ball falls into it. Thankfully a few balls fell into my hand and I didn’t do too bad, I was delighted. Everyone on the team gave a great performance.
‘It’s huge this year that no matter what happens on the field we stick to the game plan, we don’t change our process or plan. When the goal went in we knew we’d still get chances to bring it back, I think Tom got the next point after the puck-out.
‘It’s a great feeling, a huge feeling, but at the end of the day it’s only a quarter-final, we’re back in a semi-final in two weeks.’
Just like his brother, Tom insisted the players weren’t panicked by Richie Hogan’s goal, despite watching Kilkenny do the same to so many other teams in the past. Part of the reason has to be that Tom captained Limerick to success against the same opposition in last year’s All-Ireland Under 21 final. ‘Once they got the goal there was never a negative thought that went through the head really, it was just about get on the next ball, don’t let that affect you, get on the ball and get the next score and that’s what we did. ‘It has been instilled in us the last couple of years. This group has a bit of steel about them. There’s a never-say-die attitude there. There’s huge resilience in the group — even when [Kilkenny] did get the goal, there was a real mental strength shown. Not once was there panic. It was straight back to your position, get the next ball and get on the road again.’ Clinching promotion from Division 1B — finally — was another sign of this team’s upward curve under John Kiely. The only speedbump came in the last round of the Munster group stage in Ennis when the tank seemed to be empty. ‘I know some people said it was our third week in a row,’ said Dan, ‘but I think that’s more of a mental thing than a physical thing. We looked back on the video and we felt that we didn’t play well but we were still very much in that game with 10, 12 minutes to go, though they got the last seven points of the game.
‘There were things in that game that we usually wouldn’t do, silly mistakes. Thankfully we got those out of our system and rectified it. Hopefully there won’t be a repeat of that for the semi-final.’
With this victory over Kilkenny bringing supporters back to 1973 and the last time they brought home the Liam MacCarthy Cup, he acknowledged that it will be hard to avoid the hype before the semi-final against Cork on Sunday week.
‘Limerick fans are great but maybe we have a habit sometimes of getting ahead of ourselves — before the Clare game people were talking about All-Ireland finals and we hadn’t even gotten to a Munster final at that stage.
‘I’m sure Limerick fans will be up in numbers for the semi-final, but Cork will be red-hot favourites for that. We’ll leave it all out there on the field and we can’t do any more than that.’
‘Limerick teams of old might have let Kilkenny go on to win that match’