Limerick’s Liam Cronin says the manner of the county’s exit from last year’s All-Ireland hurling championship fuelled their desire to makes amends in 2026.
The Treaty County lost to Dublin in last season’s All-Ireland quarter-final, the two-point defeat ending Limerick’s Liam MacCarthy ambitions.
It was one of the biggest upsets of the championship in years and hinted that Limerick’s golden age may have lost its sheen. There were fears of a player exodus over the winter, but it never materialised.
Instead, John Kiely’s men have brought a renewed energy this season and they’re now back in an All-Ireland final for the first time since 2023.
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“One of the things that amazed me coming in last year was, when you consider the success that the boys have had, their humility, their hunger to go again and to want to be more successful, I was taken aback by it,” says Cronin, who is in his second year as part of Kiely’s backroom team.
“There’s no doubt the way things finished last year, nobody involved in the group would have been happy with it. So it certainly whet our appetite in terms of the postseason and maybe reviewing what needed to be done and how we were going to be better.
“But I suppose you don’t really know until you come back in November. And to be fair to the playing group, when they come back in November and you see the hunger and the desire they have to go again, it was really refreshing.
“In the off-season, there was no talk of anybody moving away. We got the chance to talk with a couple of players at club matches and so on. You could just see that the hunger, the desire to get back to the level that they would have been happy with was still there,” Cronin adds.
“The most disappointing thing from last year was that we probably felt that we didn’t hit our own standards in that quarter-final, in particular. So, yes, it was very much a case of ‘let’s throw everything at it this year and see where that takes us.’”
Limerick achieved a breakthrough success to win the Liam MacCarthy in 2018 – the county’s first All-Ireland senior triumph since 1973 – and achieved four successive titles between 2020 and 2023, marking a glorious period in the county’s hurling history.
Yet they keep coming back for more.
“I suppose, at an individual level, you can see that every one of the players are competitive in every nature. They just have that competitive streak,” says Cronin. “Whether it’s a Munster senior league game in January, or a championship game in May, they just have that competitive nature to them. Even in some of our internal games it comes out.
“I don’t think they look too far in the future, or in the past for that matter, I think it’s the here and the now.
“The senior players are really good at recognising that maybe while they’ve been around for the bones of a decade now, there are new players that have been added to the group in the last two years. They definitely drive the hunger too.”
Captain Cian Lynch is a key driver of that desire on and off the field for Limerick and has declared himself fit for Sunday’s decider against Galway at Croke Park. Cronin, a teacher in Ardscoil Rís, has been aware of Lynch’s talents since seeing him play as a schoolboy.
“Cian’s an incredible leader. I’m lucky enough to know Cian a long time, he was on our Harty Cup winning team in 2010, and you could see his graph coming from a long way out.
“It’s really pleasing to see the man and the leader that he has grown into now. I suppose there was never anyone questioning his technical and tactical ability on the pitch. He’s just an incredible person and man at this stage.
“Selfless is probably a word that you’d describe him, he very much puts the team first.”
