At this stage of the season, when everybody has played so many matches and nobody has any secrets, it should be easy to work out what’s going to happen next. But the circumstances keep changing. The pressure is different now. Expectations have been revised, up and down.
Limerick and Cork, the two teams who expected to win the All-Ireland at the start of the year, have both reached Croke Park on schedule. All the talk of those teams playing five games against each other this season is still alive, months after it was first mentioned.
But going into this weekend nobody really knows how Clare and Galway or fixed. Are Galway too young for this; are Clare too old? Is this just the wrong time for both of them?
After Dublin and Offaly were hammered in the quarter-finals, the usual questions about the quality of the Leinster championship were raised. There was no doubt that Galway were the best team in Leinster and along the way they had big wins over Offaly and Dublin.
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But they also lost to Dublin and the issue that day in Salthill was conceding three bad goals. Dublin scored four goals against them in the Leinster final as well, and even though two of them came very late, when the game was over, it is still worrying to concede seven goals to Dublin over two games.
Apart from the Offaly game, Cork have not been scoring goals in bunches like they had been over the last couple of seasons, but they will look for early goals against Galway on Saturday. Cork are the team with the big-game experience: nearly all of them have played in the last two All-Ireland finals and they’re going to want to make that count from the start.
A lot has been made of Galway leaving only one player inside the opposition 45 when they don’t have the ball, but that leads to congestion in the middle third of the field, not in Galway’s full-back line. Between the opposition 65 and the Galway 45 there will often be 10 or 11 Galway players, which drags in just as many from the other team. But there is still space close to the Galway goal and that is what Cork will be looking to exploit.
Galway’s strategy is to run the ball from the middle of the field, but there is also a risk in the way they’re set up. If a team presses them high up the field and forces turnovers, Galway are open. I’d be amazed if Cork didn’t try that.
Down at the other end of the field, though, Galway will ask a tactical question of Cork. Damien Cahalane is the obvious marker for Jason Rabbitte by virtue of his physique, but if Rabbitte is the lone Galway player inside the Cork 45, will Cork want Cahalane to be isolated with him?
From Cahalane’s point of view, he won’t care. People have doubted him all his career and he just keeps going. Cahalane doesn’t care who he marks and you have to admire that. He’ll back himself against whoever.
But Cork will want extra protection around him. In the Munster final Rob Downey sat back at times and all year Mark Coleman has been brilliant at dropping into the pocket and sweeping up.
Galway’s system has not stopped them from getting shots off. In the Leinster final they managed 47, with an overall shooting efficiency of 70 per cent. Those numbers will make them competitive against anybody.
Cork’s shooting in the Munster final was crazy by comparison: only 23 shots but just one wide and less than a handful of other misses. In the conditions, it was a stop-start game that day and that doesn’t suit this Cork team. What they want is a game that’s going at 100 miles an hour. They have explosiveness in their forwards and they have the fitness levels to sustain a high-octane kind of game.
With Johnny Murphy as the ref, it’s hard to know if Cork will get the ball-in-play time that suits them. There are days when he’s inclined to lay down the law and blow for everything. There are going to be a lot of bodies in the middle third so there is going to be a lot of contact. How he referees that will determine a lot.
This is a young Galway team and playing in front of a full house in Croke Park, where their supporters will be heavily outnumbered, will be a completely new experience for most of them. The way they celebrated on the pitch after the Dublin game hadn’t been seen by Leinster winners for a long time. But it also showed that it was probably their main goal for the year: get back to a Leinster final and win it.
If they don’t concede early goals I think they’ll give Cork a serious rattle. The pressure is off Galway now. Whatever happens, they’ve had a really good season. There might only be a couple of points in it at the end, but Cork’s experience will stand to them.
The problem for Clare in the other semi-final is that Limerick will prepare for them as if this was one of the games from a couple of years ago when both of them were at their peak. For most of the John Kiely years, the two teams who consistently have gone toe-to-toe with them have been Clare and Cork. When Clare beat them last year, Limerick fielded a weakened team and the game didn’t matter, but that wasn’t the case in Ennis this year when Limerick won by 15 points.
For the last two years Clare have been inconsistent and on some days they have been miles off the pace. Injuries to important players has been a recurring factor and, regardless of what team they name, we don’t know how many of their injuries have cleared up from the Dublin game.
Their main options at full back and centre back are John Conlon, Conor Cleary and David McInerney, two of whom have already been dropped this year. Cleary was cleaned out by Limerick and Conlon was destroyed by Cork. No team can afford the spine of their defence to be as unsettled as that.
Clare still have a forward line capable of putting up a big score, but they’re not going to beat Limerick in a shoot-out. That fifth game of the year between Cork and Limerick is probably just around the corner.
