Denis Walsh: Everyone left in the hurling championship is racing against time

Rooting through old newspapers the other day I came across a preview of the 1989 hurling League final between Galway and Tipperary. In those days the GAA calendar moved at barge-pace, with time to pause and wonder along the canal. The cockeyed championship system granted Galway direct passage to the All-Ireland semi-final, and it was pointed out in the piece that they had navigated the League on “autopilot” since the previous October. In that catatonic state they were also unbeaten, mind you.

According to the preview, Galway wouldn’t be cranking up their championship training until an unspecified date in late June. Probably around this time. Imagine. On the other hand, Tipperary had “only” six weeks from the League final to prepare for their opening game in the Munster championship, with a clear inference in the piece that the clock was ticking. Six weeks.

In less time than it took Tipp to cross the bridge from League to championship in 1989, the group stages of the two provincial hurling championships were played out this summer: 25 matches in 36 days. In Leinster no team had more than a two-week break. In Munster Limerick and Clare struck the jackpot with schedules that included three weeks off.

Part of the rationale for the current system is that players prefer regular matches to large blocks of training, and yet only Clare and Dublin won on successive weekends in this year’s group stages. One of the off-the-peg explanations for below-par performances in the early phase of the championship now is the suggestion that teams don’t have enough time to recover mentally or physically from a big effort the previous weekend.

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This year, Waterford and Tipperary produced their worst performance of the championship a week after nearly beating the All-Ireland champions; Westmeath produced their greatest championship performance in living memory against Wexford one Sunday and were relegated by Antrim a week later. They simply didn’t have time to come down and get back up again.

There is an emotional component to championship matches that doesn’t exist week-in, week-out in the bread-and-butter leagues of professional sports. In the GAA, emotional investment is what distinguishes the seasons. Those emotions can’t be kept on a boilerplate, they need time to cool and heat.

There is an implied acceptance of this dynamic in the reconstituted calendar. In the new football championship, for example, the reward for winning your round-robin group was to skip a round of matches and have two weeks off. Ideally, nobody wanted to play five matches in six weeks, which is the outcome for all the winners of the weekend’s preliminary quarterfinals.

After the demolition derby of the Munster hurling championship, the thing that Clare and Limerick desired most – apart from the title – was a month to get over it. Second prize was a fortnight. After last year’s titanic Munster final defeat, Brian Lohan didn’t detect a pulse in players until the following Thursday week, two days before their quarter-final against Wexford. They barely survived.

GAA players are not programmed to play championship matches in cold blood. Getting to that pitch of emotional engagement every week is a monumental stretch, even for the most willing spirit. Jim Gavin reckoned that three weeks was the optimal lead-in time for a big match. Once the football championship ramped up with the group stages of the new format last month, that kind of breather wasn’t available to anybody. How many of those games would meet Gavin’s definition of a “big match” is a different matter.

Once upon a time it felt like the championship took a month of Sundays, and at that rate there was waste in the system that the GAA was slow to accept or address. There was no future in that. But now? It feels like the season has been fired from a canon.

For eight counties their seasons ended at the weekend, six football, two hurling. There are some teams still standing in the Sam Maguire who have next to no chance of winning it, but that is not true in the Liam MacCarthy.

Limerick didn’t play at the weekend, but in a sense, the race for the title still revolves around them. They have been vulnerable for five games in a row. Against Waterford they led by eight points, against Cork they led by seven, in the Munster final against Clare they engineered an eight-point swing to lead by four, and yet all of those games were in the balance in the final minute.

Ten of their last 11 matches in the championship have been one-score games; in Limerick’s previous ten championship matches their average winning margin was nearly nine points. Sean Finn is out for the rest of the season, Cian Lynch hasn’t been himself for well over a year and Declan Hannon has already been ruled out of the All-Ireland semi-final.

How they will cope without Hannon will be interesting. When he couldn’t start the League final Dan Morrissey slotted in at number six, but that game was so one-sided it didn’t matter. Hannon went off early against Waterford, on a day when Limerick ultimately struggled, and he went off early in the 2019 All-Ireland semi-final too, the last knock-out game that Limerick lost.

How many key players can Limerick afford to lose without surrendering something essential? The channel that Hannon occupies is the most protected space in Limerick’s system. Leading from that cockpit Hannon is the team’s organisational eyes and ears. Since 2018 he has been the team captain, which clearly marks him out as a special presence in an extraordinary group. In a summer when Limerick have been stretched in every direction, this will be another tax on their resources.

But if Limerick don’t win it, who will? Clare are suffering the kind of injury crisis that a compressed calendar was always going to visit on somebody. Having spent the guts of two seasons building towards a challenge for the title, Galway looked less than the sum of their parts again on Saturday. Which is the opposite of Kilkenny. In the animal kingdom, Kilkenny would be regarded as ambush predators: happy to be unnoticed.

Anyway, in the new fast-forward calendar we won’t need to wait long for answers. Everybody left in the championship is in a race against time.