LIMERICK WERE JUST AW
SUCCESS in team sports demands certain ingredients from players, management and backroom teams.
Leadership, commitment, strategy, selflessness and performance are the five key cornerstones for any team to become successful.
It’s common for teams to display these factors on occasions during the course of a particular game and get the result. However, when all five components marry together and come to a crescendo on the sports biggest occasion of the season then it becomes absolute perfection.
That’s what we had on Sunday from Limerick in the All-Ireland Hurling final.
John Kiely, his players and backroom staff had obviously done the hard work over the course of 2020 but for it all to come together so perfectly on All-Ireland final day was something really special.
This was one of the all-time great hurling final displays which secured the Treaty men their second Liam McCarthy crown in three seasons. Perfection in the most imperfect year!
Awesome is a word usually the preserve of over-hyped American sports commentators, but the term almost seems inadequate to describe Limerick in the decider.
Power, pace, strength, tenacity, hunger, determination, teamwork, skill - I could go on and on.
While every Limerick player contributed handsomely to the victory you just had to sit back and admire the performances of Gearoid Hegarty and Tom Morrissey.
Between them they scored 12 points from play but the telepathy and understanding between the two wing forwards was something else. Hegarty landed the Man of the Match accolade, but if ever there was a case for two MOTM awards it was this year.
Waterford hung in for long periods of the contest, but those early missed goal chances and the premature departure of Tadhg de Burca conspired against them.
In the strangest of years the Deise may have hoped that 2020 would be the year they bridged the long gap back to 1959. Alas it wasn’t to be.
RE-WRITING HISTORY
NEXT Saturday evening, six days before Christmas, Dublin will attempt to re-write GAA history and win their sixth All-Ireland football title in a row.
The Dubs are overwhelming favourites to beat Mayo, but surely on the law of averages Dessie Farrell’s men are due an off day?
Some sort of disaster or calamity must be due to befall them? Nobody has got within an ass’s roar of them so far in the 2020 championship, possibly something that could go against them if Mayo can take them down to the wire in the closing quarter.
But can Mayo somehow remain in the game long enough to ask the hard questions of Farrell’s side?
James Horan returned to the Mayo hotseat last season for one purpose only. He has unfinished business with the Dubs.
His net was cast far and wide to unearth the type of player who could match the pace and power of the Dubs in the open spaces of Croke Park.
The result is seven or eight fresh faces in a new-look team with serious attacking potential.
At times during the semi-final their naivety in defence was alarmingly exposed, but better against Tipperary than the Dubs.
I’m putting my head on the block. There is only one fitting way for this ‘annus horribilis’ of 2020 to finally draw to a natural close. Mayo for Sam.
SPLIT SEASON