‘Limerick are better than ever’
ALL-IRELANDS are won on the pitch rather than in radio studios, but Anthony Daly was taken by the cut of Aaron Gillane’s jib this week.
Gillane was interviewed on Newstalk’s Off The Ball programme where, inevitably, his scatter-gun approach to freetaking in last month’s Allianz League final came up for discussion.
Gillane finished with the manof-the-match gong on the strength of scoring a sumptuous goal while racking up 1-9, but he also struck an astonishing nine wides during the course of the game. He admitted he was left cringing when he looked back at a recording of his performance.
He said he took to practising in the knowledge that, if he does not sharpen up, a lengthy queue has formed of players more than capable of relieving him of his responsibility.
‘I was actually driving out of Limerick at the time when he was talking and he started listing all those who could go his job — Peter Casey, Barry Murphy, Shane Dowling — and by the time he was finished he must have named five or six.
‘That really struck a chord with me because normally a free-taker would be thinking, “I want no-one else taking the frees, I’m the free-taker”.
‘But that was not Gillane’s attitude. It was totally selfless and that’s a great sign of what John Kiely has got going in that camp,’ explains Daly.
The Clare legend is already in countdown mode to the start of the Championship and in 20 more sleeps the hurling summer will be with us again.
It is full of possibilities, but right now momentum is with one team.
Backing up a Liam MacCarthy with a National League is rare and is usually accomplished only by the most hard-nosed teams — Kilkenny managing that feat three times in the Brian Cody era.
But a young team that has just drawn a line under a county’s 45-year wait for a Championship might be expected to drink in their success rather than busy themselves replicating it.
Daly suspects there are a couple of reasons why Limerick have not gone down that route.
‘John Kiely made the point during the League that there’s no stage where you can afford to drift as a team.
‘The other thing is that there is a healthy vibe to their panel.
‘If a fella wants to have a pint I’d say he can have a pint. But if he’s turning up and not ready to go to take on Aaron Gillane in training, he’s out the gap and there’s someone else ready to step into the 26 out of their extended squad.
‘That polices itself when you’ve a squad like that,’ explains Daly.
More than the League title, it is how aggressively Kiely has pursued adding depth to his squad which might just have given Limerick a jump-start on the rest.
When Mike Casey came off the bench in the final, he became the 33rd Limerick player to receive game-time this spring.
‘The thing with the League, he seems to have found a guy for
every line,’ says Daly, who is well positioned to gauge Limerick’s emerging talent having spent three years in charge of their academy.
‘You would have to say that nobody got more out of the League in terms of learning than Limerick and when you see the likes of Conor Boylan, Paddy O’Loughlin and Colin Ryan, you can see the options they have. They even went and blooded Mikey O’Brien who is
‘He’s been a top class goalkeeper for years but the puck out retention just became unbelievable last year. Yet in the one game they gave Barry Hennessy this year, that retention rate went up.
‘I know it was against Laois who they are a level above but that retention rate is down to a system whereby if you can create space, you will get the ball in hand and that’s what they’re doing around the middle.
‘And then if teams press up on them they’ve obviously those three weapons (Gearoid Hegarty, Kyle Hayes and Tom Morrissey) in the half-forward line to go long to.
‘And if they press up on your puck-out, you are likely to end up contesting for ball against a half-back trip of Morrissey, Hannon and Byrnes and that is not going to be easy.’
With Galway, Kilkenny and Clare hit with injuries, Cork and Tipperary struggling for consistency, it all points to Limerick being the team to beat.
Perhaps, says Daly, but if recent history tells anything it is that front-running in the hurling Championship is a precarious business. ‘This time last year we all said Galway were ahead of the posse, the year before all the talk was about Tipperary. ‘We are only in the business of speculating, but the vibes are
good.’