Kilkenny’s renewal or Limerick’s consistency?

KILLINAN END

Limerick's All-Ireland victory has, by all accounts, elevated the team to a new standing in hurling history. Five All-Ireland titles apparently weren't enough. Neither, it seems, were four in a row. Instead, it was victory over a Galway side that may not even rank among the country's top five that finally tipped opinion decisively in Limerick's favour. Of course, it is slightly disingenuous to suggest that the team was not already held in the very highest regard, but several respected pundits, including Nicky English, John Mullane, and Anthony Daly, have now spoken of them as perhaps the greatest team of them all.

Reaction on Noreside - a place both fiercely protective of and deeply invested in its place in hurling’s pecking order - inevitably cites the sheer scale of the achievements of the team in Black & Amber from 2000 to 2015. And it was, indeed, a truly remarkable period of success. Eleven All-Ireland titles in sixteen seasons remains beyond comparison as an achievement. The difficulty, however, is that this statistic is fraught with complexity when used in comparisons between Kilkenny and Limerick. We must be wary of the old advice about comparing apples with oranges.

A remarkable feature of the 2026 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Final was that eleven of the players who saw action for Limerick had also featured in the 2018 final. To a very large extent, it can be said that Limerick have won six All-Ireland titles in nine years with essentially the same team. You can enter one of those philosophical discussions about whether a car remains the same car if all of its parts have been replaced over time. In Limerick's case, however, the analogy scarcely gets out of the starting blocks. This has remained recognisably the same team in essence from the very beginning or at least as much as any team reasonably can over nine years.

The case of Kilkenny is quite different. The Noreside team of 2000 contained three players who had been beaten by Tipperary in the 1991 final. One-fifth of the 2000 starting team played in that match, yet we are expected to accept the proposition that the Kilkenny teams of 2000 and 2015 were one and the same? Not a single player remained from the 2000 panel when the MacCarthy Cup was raised fifteen years later.

The 2000 team recorded a comprehensive victory over Offaly and undoubtedly provided a significant springboard for the remarkable decade that followed. Yet by 2008 - eight years later, the same time frame through which we now view Limerick's achievements -only three of the starters from 2000 lined out in the final against Waterford.

The irony is that, while this considerably weakens one comparison between Kilkenny and Limerick, it is impossible not to be impressed by the extraordinary depth within Kilkenny hurling that allowed such extensive renewal without interrupting success. It is a challenge that may not be far away for Limerick, and how they respond to it may well define the next decade of hurling. Can they regenerate and return again and again, almost seamlessly, as perennial All-Ireland contenders?

Evidence from Kilkenny runs even deeper. Only one player - Eoin Larkin - started both the 2008 and 2015 finals. That represents a period one year shorter than the window through which we admire Limerick's remarkable consistency of personnel. Consider this: a friend of mine regularly argues that Kilkenny's four All-Ireland victories between 2011 and 2015 represent the county's greatest achievement of this century. His reasoning is that the standard of opposition was stronger during those years than it had been during Kilkenny's earlier four-in-a-row. Naturally, this humble matter of opinion would rattle a few cages.

But was 2011-15 actually one team? Only five players who started the 2011 final also started in 2015. Of course, some of that turnover can be explained by injury or other temporary absences, but the central point remains. This was a constantly evolving series of Kilkenny teams rather than one fixed group growing old together. If TJ Reid (a member of the 2015 team) joins the Kilkenny panel again next year, he will do so some forty years after John Power (a member of the 2000 team) first joined the Kilkenny senior panel.

That gap approximates the period between John Power's debut and that of Diamond Hayden back in the 1940s. Time moved relentlessly over those sixteen seasons of Kilkenny dominance, making it impossible to sustain a claim that this was one homogeneous group progressing from beginning to end. If there is merit in comparing Kilkenny and Limerick, it cannot rest on the fiction that a single Kilkenny team went from pillar to post throughout that great Noreside era.

Notwithstanding the contribution of new blood this year, Limerick's greatness lies is based on one largely recognisable team. Kilkenny's lay in something different altogether: the remarkable capacity of a county to renew itself while scarcely interrupting its pursuit of All-Ireland titles. Both are exceptional achievements, but they are fundamentally different achievements.