The gap between the end of one championship and the beginning of the next has never been greater in the calendar and yet timekeeping in the GAA has not changed. Part of next year is always stuck in last year. Time is always on the half-turn.
In other sports, winning and losing are part of a weekly continuum and there is a premium on moving on. In the GAA, that has always been complicated. Nothing that Cork have done since they collapsed in the All-Ireland final nine months ago can confirm or deny their state of wellbeing now. In the half-light of the dead months, there are no empirical measurements for anything.
Limerick have spent the spring strenuously distancing themselves from the All-Ireland quarter-final last June, when they were caught by a freak wave and keeled over in their dinghy. The capacity to win in Croke Park had been the great behavioural leap of the John Kiely years, but for the second year in a row they were eliminated on Jones’ Road by a team that failed to win the All-Ireland afterwards.
What did that say about Limerick? The league cannot answer that question beyond reasonable doubt.
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After every championship, stuff is left unresolved. Nobody can depend on time being a healer. For every team, something happened last year that was an impediment to moving on and cannot just be wished away. In the championship, every blank page has grease stains, like chip paper.
Are Kilkenny really as flaky as they looked against Tipperary in the All-Ireland semi-final? Did Galway hit rock bottom? Are Wexford still in free fall? Are Dublin as spunky as they looked against Limerick, or as bereft as they looked against Cork, or as middling as they looked against Galway? They’re still trying to figure that out. They’re trying to convince themselves. They don’t know.
The championship won’t put a tooth in it.
How Tipp wear the crown will be one of the most fascinating stories. Last year’s All-Ireland was one of the greatest in their illustrious history. To beat the reigning champions, the league winners, the Munster champions and the Leinster champions in the same campaign had never been done before, by anybody.
To win the All-Ireland they won six games in a row; nobody else stitched together a winning streak of more than four; Limerick and Cork maxxed out at two. They arrived at round three with just one point from their opening two games and if they had lost in Ennis their summer was over.
That kind of momentum, though, is not a strategy. It is not something they can hope to repeat. What they need is another layer of sustainable improvement, from somewhere.
Last year, it happened organically. Darragh McCarthy, Robert Doyle and Sam O’Farrell had breakthrough seasons that amounted to much more than Liam Cahill would have budgeted for; Andrew Ormond blazed like a comet; John McGrath made the greatest comeback since John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, and known quantities such as Willie Connors and Michael Breen made an unexpected difference.
Ultimately, their energy, unity, and tactical cojones were irresistible. So now, they must do it again, and probably do it differently. Will everyone get back to the same level? Will anybody new make the same impact as last year’s rookies? Follow-ups are tough. Travolta’s next movie after Pulp Fiction was White Man’s Burden. Ever heard of it?
In seven failed attempts to defend an All-Ireland title since the mid-1960s, Tipp have only reached the following year’s decider once. They’ve been listening to versions of that story for the last nine months. They won’t be the first Tipp team to swear an oath to this mission.
The only contenders they failed to beat last year were Limerick; they haven’t beaten them in the championship since a no-consequence round robin game in Thurles seven years ago. It’s hard to imagine Tipp winning the All-Ireland this year without arresting that trend. Even for champions there are new frontiers.
It will be interesting to see if winning the All-Ireland with a sweeper in the final will lead to any tactical revisionism, even as an emergency option. After Waterford lost the 2017 final, and Wexford lost the 2019 semi-final against 14 men, and after a raft of inferior teams failed with an extra defender against Limerick in their prime, the groupthink was that All-Irelands couldn’t be won with a full-time sweeper.
Cahill and Mickey Bevans and their lieutenants, though, were dealing with a particular set of circumstances: over the previous 14 months they had lost to Cork by 18 points, 15 points and 10 points. They insisted to the players that it would be the most attacking sweeper system ever seen, but first of all, it was an act of self-defence.
Cahill and Bevans had failed with a sweeper before in Croke Park with Waterford in 2021 when Limerick beat them by 11 points in the All-Ireland semi-final. But the greater risk for them last July was not to try something.
Will they roll it out again this weekend? As All-Ireland champions on their home turf would it look unacceptably fearful? Why should they care?
Cork haven’t lost to Tipp in Thurles in the Munster championship for 10 years. That day Cork were so afraid of Seamus Callanan that they played a sweeper behind the full-back line. Didn’t work.
The team with the strongest identity is still Limerick. It is 30 years since Liam Griffin described hurling as “the Riverdance of sport.” The thrust of his comparison was the joy and exuberance and native expression common to the game and the dance. What Griffin couldn’t have imagined was that anybody in hurling would take choreography to the level that Limerick have.
In the league final, Limerick smothered Cork in a way that was familiar against all-comers during their long prime: they compressed the space between their goal and the opposite 65. Once Limerick are allowed to dictate those terms, they turn the screw. Nobody is more efficient in tight spaces or more direct in open spaces.
For Limerick, the league was a reset. Caroline Currid returned as performance coach after a two-year absence and none of their core players were given a significant rest. For them, it feels like the Dublin footballers in 2023: a generational group of players winding up for one more tilt at the summit.
Their system of play is governed by such a strict grammar that offences against the game plan are not difficult to identify and correct. Its transparency makes no difference when their execution is aggressive and on point. What they lost last year, and to an extent the year before, was consistency. Their base level dropped. The primary purpose of their league campaign was to restore that.
Nobody knows if Cork can recover from the trauma of last year’s All-Ireland final. Other teams have come back from losing two finals in a row to win in the third year – Kilkenny in 2000, Cork in 1984 – but one significant difference was that those teams had All-Ireland winners in their ranks: Kilkenny had two in 2000, Cork had seven in 1984.
Cork’s preseason training was designed around generating toughness, with boxing drills and hellish running, and there was a noticeable edge to their play in the league. But to win the All-Ireland, Cork will need other ideas. In the All-Ireland final last year, their mentality failed them. The search for solutions must start there.
Outside of Limerick, Tipperary and Cork, it is hard to see who will make a run. Official summertime in Clare started at 2.02pm on Sunday, April 5th when Shane O’Donnell scored his first goal of the season. If Clare can keep him healthy, along with Tony Kelly and Diarmuid Ryan, they will pose a massive threat to everyone. Having their opening two games at home must be a help, even if they failed to win either of their Ennis fixtures last year.
There are no potential All-Ireland winners in Leinster, and that is a massive concern for the championship. Kilkenny are running up and down on the spot, Galway are knocking walls and building again, Wexford lack quality and squad depth. In that environment, Dublin ought to be good enough to win a Leinster title, but they have an issue with conviction.
So, who wins the All-Ireland? Limerick are favourites for the seventh time in the last eight years. There is one more in them.
