The lads in the RTÉ studio at Croke Park looked as if they were suited-and-booted for a wedding so impressive were their respective get-ups, and it was hard to tell if Jackie Tyrrell’s throwing in of the waistcoat gave him a slight edge over Anthony Daly in the Kilkenny v Clare match-up.
Beauty was in the eye of the beholder and all that, so whatever fashion edge one had over the other – or didn’t – was immaterial at the end of the day when the only thing that truly mattered was the outcome down on the field as the two teams served up an epic second half that went down to the wire, with the Cats just about holding out to reach another final with Limerick.
Before a ball had been pucked in anger Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng had kept things close to his chest in the pre-match interview with Damien Lawlor – “he tells us just about as much as Brian [Cody] told us over the years,” quipped Sunday Game presenter Joanne Cantwell and she wasn’t wrong – while the rumour doing the round that Mark Rodgers wasn’t fit to play proved to be just that, a rumour, when things did get under way.
And the first half did bring a little bit of hurling history with TJ Reid moving to the top of the all-time hurling championship scoring charts. “Some achievement,” said co-commentator Michael Duignan of Reid’s scoring feat, but he also noted something else as the game worked its way through a first half which Kilkenny dominated.
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“There’s an edge creeping into it,” said commentator Darragh Maloney.
“You’d expect it,” swatted back Duignan.
Not that pundit Liam Sheedy was too impressed with Clare’s first-half efforts that had them five points adrift at the break. “There’s no point having [intensity] in Limerick and Thurles, you have to have it in Croke Park,” said the Tipp man, the neutral so-to-speak of the three panellists along with the fashion aficionados Tyrrell and Daly.
No doubt Brian Lohan was saying something similar to his men in the dressingroom during the interval because Clare were a different team on the resumption. “They’re ditched the sweeper, binned him,” observed Maloney of Clare’s more aggressive strategic intent.
Before the match Tyrrell had observed of Clare’s dynamo forward Shane O’Donnell that he was “afraid of my life of him . . . he’s impossible to mark”. And those words rang true when O’Donnell fired his team in front midway through the second half and Kilkenny were at sixes and sevens in working out how to get their mojo back.
In the earlier All-Ireland camogie quarter-final Marty Morrissey had observed of Kilkenny’s late fightback, “they never know they’re beaten until they’re virtually on the M50”. The women didn’t quite get that job done, narrowly losing out to Cork, but those words also applied to the men an hour or so later.
And the Cats eventually got their numbers right, capitalising on Clare being too cute coming out of defence for TJ Reid to set up Eoin Cody for a critical goal that turned things back in their favour and then a late wonder save – not for the first time – from goalkeeper Eoin Murphy to defy Peter Duggan.
“Nickie Quaid might have changed the game last night going down when there was nothing wrong [with him],” said Tyrrell in an edged remark on the Limerick netminder taking the momentum from Galway in the Saturday semi-final, “but Eoin Murphy’s changed this game with his save at the end.”
Touché!
Sheedy talked of the thin margins at play, pointing to there only being the “width of a hurley” in it in Cody being able to get his strike away in time before John Conlon’s attempted hook, while Daly talked of Clare being “too casual” initially in that defensive play which led to the Cody goal.
“I’m not whingeing,” insisted Daly, “but those little margins cost you on an epic day like this.”
He wasn’t wrong.
