Can Waterford handle being the favourites to land Liam?
LIKE everybody else, I’m hugely excited about the start of the Championship. The National League is just over and here we are, in mid-April, with Leinster and Munster upon us. At the end of the year, maybe it will be worth looking at a tweak in the calendar and pushing the Championship back another week. It all feels really condensed. The reality of a July All-Ireland final is that most teams are going to be out really early.
What a Sunday of action, though, with the box-office Munster double of Cork versus Limerick and Waterford up against Tipperary.
The way Waterford have regrouped since the 2020 All-Ireland final defeat by Limerick has been so impressive. Manager Liam Cahill must have reflected on the physical power of Limerick that day.
The Déise have a lot of really good hurlers but the champions brought the power and physicality of their game to another level on the biggest stage.
So many hurling fans have huge fondness for Waterford, especially as one with such a long wait to lift the Liam MacCarthy Cup. Galway ended a 29-year gap in 2017, while Limerick ended a 45-year one 12 months later.
Waterford, though, still have to go all the way back to 1959 and the replay victory over Kilkenny, a day a young Eddie Keher made his debut after featuring in the minor final for Kilkenny.
What impresses me is the enthusiasm year-in year-out, to come back and drive on. Suddenly, here they are, a lot of people’s favourites for the All-Ireland. How will they handle it?
I didn’t play much against them in the 1990s – we could have met in 1998 after the three games against Clare but Kilkenny beat them in the other All-Ireland semi-final. They probably felt that was the year that got away.
I retired in 2001 and the next seven or eight years produced some of the great Waterford players like Ken McGrath, Tony Browne, Paul Flynn and Dan Shanahan. I was looking at the statistics of John Mullane. He lies 30th in the list of all-time Championship scorers with 15 goals and 134 points in 47 matches. That’s 3.8 points per game – an incredible scoring rate and all from play. He lit up so many matches. Or look at ‘Brick’ Walsh, what a warrior.
They got close and won some epic Munster finals but just couldn’t get over the line. Why? That’s the big question, because they had the talent.
Perhaps that complete team ethos wasn’t always as strong as it needed to be. They had some great team players but maybe not everybody was in that same mould.
Look at the great Kilkenny team, or the Tipp team of the noughties, or Limerick now.
Of course there are players with individual brilliance but it was all about the team all of the time.
Take the Waterford team in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final against Limerick. Jamie Barron and his dancing feet. Austin Gleeson, who can do anything. The swashbuckling play of
Tadhg de Búrca – until injury struck him down. Individual players who impact the game in such a brilliant way.
What was striking about their League success was the sense of the collective. Waterford hadn’t won it since
2015 and the scenes on the pitch at Semple
Stadium said a lot about how important it was to win silverware.
But reading too much into the League is a dangerous game for Waterford because Tipperary’s track record seems to have been totally forgotten about. It’s only 2019 since they won the All-Ireland. Paudie Maher’s forced retirement is a massive loss but they still have a lot of good players. You have the pick from the Under 21 and U20 All-Ireland-winning teams. While Liam Sheedy felt they weren’t ready, they have had another year of development and the freedom now to express themselves.
Jason Forde, John McGrath, Jake Morris, Mark Kehoe – that’s just a flavour of their attacking talent.
At the back you’ve Cathal Barrett and Ronan Maher, serious players. Everyone is talking up Waterford as potential All-Ireland champions so that will bring its own pressure.
At home in front of their own crowd – they have to perform and back up that League trophy.
The GAA public can be a little bit fickle. You can see that with the talk of a slow uptake of tickets in Tipperary. If they get going and win here, maybe you’ll see a huge change there. It was difficult for Colm Bonnar coming in after Sheedy. He held the Miller Shield, did a trawl of the county for new players. That was hugely positive in giving every player a chance and he played 30-plus players during the League. He had to put his own stamp on things so you’d think the fans would be getting behind the team, driving on the lads.
So Tipp also need to produce a performance. Right now, it looks like Waterford, Limerick and Cork are the top three in the country. It’s up to Tipperary to answer that.
I’d be wary of them but I expect Waterford to win.
When it comes to Cork against Limerick, I can’t get away from the last two All-Ireland final performances by the champions – such form doesn’t disappear overnight.
It’s hard to get up again but I loved the defiance of Gearóid Hegarty this week, basically saying: ‘I don’t care what you think. This is the way I play, this is the way the team plays.’
They are an exceptional team. One of their best stick men is corner-back Barry Nash – he has power and pace and can sting from deep. Limerick knew they were going to stay up in the League – they were training away with a different purpose. I think they’ll be ready to rock.
The mental side of it is huge for Cork. They’ve played some brilliant hurling over the last year but their running game has to be so exact.
And when the powerful teams stay with them and it all breaks down, it can look terrible.
In full flow, they are a joy to watch – players like Shane Kingston, Darragh Fitzgibbon, Patrick Horgan. But can their game survive against the very top teams?
Limerick will want to remind everyone they are the team to beat.