Forget the phoney war... it is all about the championship
ALL EYES will be on Nowlan Park this afternoon. We can usually expect fireworks when Kilkenny and Tipperary clash and even though it’s still very early in the year — and the two teams are at different levels in their physical preparation — there is plenty at stake for both teams here.
I heard talk during the week about this being a chance for Tipp to lay down a marker, given their recent record against the All-Ireland champions. While it is true that certain teams get a psychological boost from beating Kilkenny at this time of the season — Derek McGrath will know it did his Waterford side no harm last weekend — the real time to lay down markers is during the summer. They need to beat Kilkenny when it truly counts — in the Championship.
All the same, Michael Ryan will want to build on how his team performed last week. I was impressed by how Tipperary handled the conditions in Thurles. They looked very sharp for the first weekend of the League, and played a more direct style which was effective in the conditions. However, this has to be viewed in the context of how poorly Dublin played (and seeing Danny Sutcliffe in a television studio talking about Dublin hurling, rather than on the pitch, indicates all is not right in the capital).
Giving the Munster Senior League a miss seems to have been the correct decision for Tipperary as they sprung out of the traps in Semple Stadium, but they will find that Kilkenny won’t be as obliging today.
Nobody will be pressing any panic buttons because Kilkenny fell to Waterford last week. Their opponents have a lot more work on the training field done than the All-Ireland champions, who are only back from holidays a few weeks. That’s also likely to be the case with Tipperary today.
Brian Cody will want to get up and running, especially as another defeat will plunge them into a second successive relegation battle. But while Kilkenny traditionally took the League very seriously during their glory years, I think the competition is going to serve a different purpose for Cody this year. He needs to unearth a few new players — specifically forwards.
I was down in the James Stephens clubhouse last Saturday night for a Strictly Come Dancing fundraiser. The general mood among most people was the same. They needed to find a couple of players. The retirement of Richie Power and Ger Aylward’s unfortunate cruciate ligament injury shows how stretched their squad is.
When the Cats were at their peak, during the four-in-a-row, their strength in depth was the envy of the rest of Ireland. It nearly became cliched to suggest that Kilkenny’s second XV was the second best team in the country. Nobody’s saying that anymore.
Aylward’s emergence last year eased the scoring burden on TJ Reid and Richie Hogan. It still falls to those two to do the bulk of the scoring, while Eoin Larkin, Walter Walsh and Colin Fennelly all have clear jobs in the do in the attack. They work hard and pop up with the occasional score.
But Aylward possessed that X-factor. He had a bit of flair and scoring ability and added a different dimension to the attack. And those sort of flair forwards are not easy to find, even in Kilkenny.
If you look at last week’s game in Walsh Park, Diarmuid Cody, Brian’s son, came into the half-back line and did a fine job after graduating from the Under 21s. Defenders will never be an issue for Kilkenny. They will always produce them. But this League is about finding some new faces in the attack.
It has always been Cody’s way that players generally serve an apprenticeship in the panel before they are given a chance. It’s extremely unlikely that Kilkenny would ever win a senior All-Ireland with five U21s in the team as Clare did in 2013.
Cody tends to watch players for two or three years, and get a proper measure of their attitude and work ethic before their chance comes at 22 or 23.
There have been exceptions, of course. JJ Delaney, Tommy Walsh and Henry Shefflin were all thrown in at a tender age. And even Walter Walsh before the 2012 replay against Galway. But mostly, you find that players have had to bide their time with Cody.
The Kilkenny manager doesn’t have that luxury this spring, not if he wants to inject some new blood into an attack that has a very settled look. Reid, Hogan, Walsh, Fennelly and Larkin (when he returns from Syria) will all be on the team-sheet but someone needs to put their hand up to replace Aylward. I can’t see too many.
It’s why, I feel, that for the first time in recent memory, Kilkenny’s squad is being stretched, not that there will be much sympathy for their plight in the rest of the country!
I still think that Kilkenny will edge past Tipperary this afternoon, though. Cody will understand the significance of winning this game. He does not want to be trying to unearth new players in the heat of a relegation battle.