A portent of things to come

KILLINAN END

Breathing space for the Tipperary senior hurlers as the Under-20s take centre stage. Another trip to hostile territory after the All-Ireland Minor Final against the same opposition last year and the League Final against Cork. One of these days we’ll get a home game of some significance, but we won’t be holding our breaths.

Nevertheless, Nowlan Park will be a venue of suitable proportions to generate the good sense of occasion that the players deserve. The word on the street has Tipp as slight favourites for what that’s worth and the few players with Senior experience will give the team a shove on for sure. Finals are invariably hard won, and this can be expected to be no different.

Four decades ago, we won an All-Ireland Under-21 Final against the same opposition by the narrowest of margins. Despite being better as well as bigger and stronger than Kilkenny, it was as it had been at the same Walsh Park venue five years earlier, a one-point game. In hindsight there is indeed nothing special to recommend the Kilkenny team that lined out against Tipp in the final forty years ago. Eamon Morrissey and Eddie O'Connor are the only two names which stand out as having subsequently had significant Senior careers in the Black & Amber. By contrast Tipp’s line-out was bubbling over with talent.

The primacy of Roscrea as an underage powerhouse in those years is clear from the presence of Michael Scully, Donal Kealy, and Paul Delaney. Delaney had been a Minor just the previous year and was a young player on that under 21 team. Yet, just two years later, he was an indispensable part of the Senior team that toppled Cork in the Killarney replay. What a player he subsequently became for Tipp during those heady days. Colm Bonner, John McGrath, Noel Sheehy, Liam Stokes, and John Kennedy all pulled on the Senior jersey in the following years, some of them carving out careers that stand comparison with any.

Those players will testify as quickly as any to the difficulty of getting over the line in a final. Like the current crew, they also beat Clare in the Munster final which on that occasion was a home game in Thurles. Kilkenny regretted their soft route to the final which left them largely untested. The All-Ireland Final, it was said, was no place to find out your weaknesses, and for while in that final it looked as if a big beating was in store for them.

Tipp had the experience of being in the two previous finals – defeats both – and despite hitting thirteen wides in the first half pulled away early in the second period. In true Kilkenny fashion they did not collapse and surged back with a couple of goals to make the finish tight and tense. Such it was back then and likely ever will be against this opposition.

Our smattering of Seniors among the youthful generation will hopefully engender some the intensity and never-say-die attitude we have seen from Liam Cahill's team. By many measures we have finished the round-robin stage of the Senior championship in as good a shape as any. Limerick, for all their power, need to be playing a full hand at all times to be unassailable. Cork have been shown to have flying feet of clay.

Their pace is all well and good when they're running at you, but they can be got at and under stress take bad decisions and strike poor wides as much as anyone else does. Naturally the Munster Final will tell us more about these two teams even if it will hardly be the end of the story. Their meeting again in Croke Park might be anticipated by many but with the gloss coming off Cork, in particular, in the last fortnight, summer altitude seems no longer a given.

Some have even committed the sacrilege of questioning the quality of the hurling championship so far, even the Munster championship. Certainly, there is something unsatisfactory about Kilkenny losing to Wexford, and Limerick losing to Clare, but neither game actually mattering. One of the ones that did matter was Dublin v Galway and this was but a very pale imitation of its Gaelic Football counterpart game of a few weeks ago between these counties. Even the Cork-Waterford game appeared more competitive than it was with the sense that Cork without being great were always likely to come through.

It is to be hoped that's the two provincial finals will boost the championship with two games worthy of the occasions. To be fair it seems unlikely, highly unlikely, that Limerick and Cork could provide anything short of another compelling struggle. Limerick’s destruction of Cork a couple of weeks ago will surely summon every ounce of defiance in the Rebel County.

Even if they look like a team with familiar problems, such as at full-back, and a tendency to be immeasurably better up front when their tails are up, they cannot afford another tanking.

That alone should concentrate the mind. Galway have gone from abysmal to reasonably efficient since the championship started. They have surely exhausted their impressive repertoire of ways to lose to Kilkenny and might raise more of a gallop against an ordinary Kilkenny team than previously looked possible.

Hopefully, we have good things to look forward to starting on Saturday.