Canning concern overrides Galway’s grief
Injury to star forward puts everything in perspective for O’Neill who insists contest ‘could have gone either way’
SIRENS echo through the Northside air as Shane O’Neill glances up into an echoey landscape, the price of this strange day written clearly in his eyes. His only update on Joe is no update, just that he’s in the medical room. You sense nobody’s got much appetite for forensics here, given what we’ve seen.
Joe Canning motionless on the turf for maybe eight minutes before being stretchered down a tunnel where the Canal End and Cusack Stand meet.
Someone murmurs a stark thought that it could even be our last glimpse of the Portumna maestro in Croke Park, arms criss-crossed, eyes staring towards the sky, a spinal board beneath him. The suggestion is hastily brushed away by all who hear it.
O’Neill talks of his pride in a beaten team and he’s entitled to.
Losing Cathal Mannion to injury inside 24 minutes had to be an earth tremor to Galway’s senses. Losing Joe the way they lost him?
Presumably a bomb. And yet they’ve coursed Limerick deep into this misty November evening. Chased them down until, in the end, almost implausible resilience wore them down.
John Kiely refers to it as his team “embracing the difficulty” and nobody needs an explanation.
Limerick are in another All-Ireland final and that is nothing less than just. Compared to their opponents on Sunday week, there’s a stoic, self-contained, unnaturally measured air to Kiely’s team. They play like men who maybe deplore melodrama.
In this, they are the antithesis of their past, Limerick hurling today with heads that refuse to overheat. They bring a tactics board to waterbreaks. They figure things out and break stuff down.
O’Neill is asked about their capacity to accelerate from such stoppages, but he’s not for biting.
“I don’t know, you’d have to ask Limerick what they’re doing,” he replies a little testily. “I’ve no idea, we just look after ourselves.”
If Saturday night was an ungovernable blizzard of curses and melodies and utterly magical interludes, this was hurling as power arithmetic. The game as rolling thunder. Two big, hugely self-controlled teams rutting like stags without ever giving way to real abandon.
And Joe?
Through the 61 minutes he was able to contribute, Galway kept shuttling him between half-forward and a twoman inside line. He swept four majestic line ‘cuts’ over Nickie Quaid’s crossbar as well as eight frees.
He took a rasp of the hurley across his back from Gearóid Hegarty approaching half-time that – applying the letter of the law – really ought to have been punished with a red card.
But Joe didn’t score from play because Galway, broadly, just couldn’t reach him.
“I don’t think probably enough ball went in to the full-forward line,” says O’Neill.
Had it done so, who can say what script might have been written?
Because you get no preened feathers, no ego with Canning, just a hunter’s focus. But he’s 33 next year and, well, there’s been a hamstring torn right off the bone and, last year, a groin injury that kept him sidelined essentially until it was too late.
Playground
On his great days, the game looks almost a private playground to him. But even a regent’s body can only take so much.
We were just past the hour, Dan Morrissey having a yard on him running to a low ball beneath the Hogan Stand, when Joe’s deft flick essentially took big Dan out of commission.
We had a two-point game, Canning now wheeling back for the sliotar, a green flag – you sensed – looming large in his mind.
But Kyle Hayes and Joseph Cooney came barrelling down that same corridor and it was Cooney’s shoulder that seemed to make sickening contact with Canning’s head.
There and then a quiet stadium fell, suddenly, hospital-theatre still.
The loss of their talisman might have broken Galway, but it didn’t.
After an eight-minute suspension of play, Evan Niland’s first act of the evening was to nail a monster free from his own ’65. Conor Whelan quickly then drew them level in the 70th minute and the board went up. Nine minutes still to run.
And that’s when Limerick did what Limerick do.
Going after Éanna Murphy’s puckouts, they won the remainder 0-5 to 0-2, Peter Casey, especially, seeming to summon a radar-sense of where Murphy might target, setting up points for Tom Morrissey and Adrian Breen.
Niland did hit a magnificent score of his own and, bizarrely, Fintan Burke also nailed Galway’s fifth successful line ‘cut’ of the day. But Limerick had that boa constrictor squeeze on now. They were pushing for home. Cold, ruthless, unblinking.
And for O’Neill, himself a Limerick man who – like Kiely – hurled for the county through that harrowing mid’90s stretch that would scar so many for so long, there was no mistaking what we were witnessing now.
“An absolutely epic battle between two ridiculously good sides,” he says quietly. “Very physical. There wasn’t much space. And any space, it was a credit to the boys to actually exploit it.
“They should be very proud of what they achieved today. There’s not much
difference between the sides, in the end it could have gone either way.
“Our substitutes were absolutely fantastic today when they came on, every single one of them.
“The 15 who started, the five, the other six who didn’t get game-time today and the boys at home. They’ve been just unbelievable for us and they’ve done Galway so proud.”
They’d been beaten, essentially, by Limerick’s ability to jolt their game into another time-zone.
By the strength of a bench that seems, always, to deliver. By nerves that seldom fray. To that end, this felt almost like something being pulled from the pages of an old story here. And yet Galway just would not die. Someone asks O’Neill, finally, about his Limerickness. About the possibility of being a supporter again when his native county locks horns with Waterford just 12 days before Christmas.
He responds with an oddly bleak smile.
“That hasn’t come into my thought process at all,” he shrugs. “We’re all absolutely gutted in the dressing-room and we’re just trying to lift the lads some way. Don’t know how yet though.”