Seán Moran: League meant exactly what Limerick chose it to mean

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,’”

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

Watching Limerick dismantle Cork – again – raised a few questions and one of them was about the hurling league. The All-Ireland champions and Kilkenny in their pomp would be nobody’s idea of Humpty Dumpty but it has become clear that in both cases, the league meant exactly what they chose it to mean.

It had even become a frustration in Cork that the county had gone since 1998 without winning the Croke Cup. After all, such success didn’t do Kilkenny any harm.

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Nor had it. Brian Cody’s teams have won nearly as many leagues as All-Irelands (10-11) and six of them as part of doubles. Was that, however, the league validating Kilkenny or the other way around?

Look at the fate of other league winners during the times of plenty of Kilkenny from 2000 up until the most recent MacCarthy Cup in 2015.

Every other team apart from Kilkenny to win the league in this timespan – Galway (2000, ’04 and 2010), Tipperary (2001 and ’08), Waterford (2007 and ’15) and Dublin (2011) – with the exception of Tipp in 2001 failed to add the All-Ireland later in the year.

More resonantly, four of them had their summers ended by Kilkenny, frequently in rather brutal circumstances. In other words, Cody’s teams generally chose just what the league meant, either the first leg of a double or a dazzlingly false dawn.

There would have to be a caveat about the applicability of all this to other counties, especially those in Munster, who had a fully functioning provincial championship to negotiate when the league was over.

A Kilkenny official once said that players were briefed every year on the value to the county board of a good run in the league and generally responded to this. There’s no point though in fantasising that were such engagement proven to have adverse impacts on championship preparation, it wouldn’t have been knocked on the head there and then.

Average winning margin

By way of illustration, Kilkenny lost just three Leinster matches in the 17 years between Cody’s appointment in 1998 and the last of the 11 All-Irelands. In the 14 successful provincial finals, the average winning margin was nearly 10 points (9.57).

If the value of a league was strictly dependent on what province you were in – Tipperary remain the only Munster county in more than 20 years to have won the league and championship double – what are we to make of the current situation?

On Sunday the anticipation around the Cork-Limerick opening round in Munster was largely based on supposed improvements made by Cork (and a charitable overlooking of their final performance against Waterford) during the league and a corresponding fall-off by the champions.

Leave aside the complete failure to make their short-game, exit strategy out of defence work and there was another problem for Cork. Their only block of physical work had to have been before the league started, as they had match-on-match engagements from then until two weeks before last Sunday.

Limerick had four weeks between their last match against Offaly and the Cork match and evidently used it well, as they overwhelmed their opponents in the physical exchanges.

Manager John Kiely used the league for his own purposes. As he told Michael Moynihan in the Irish Examiner last December, the approach to 2022 would entail, “…being aware of what’s needed at a particular time and sticking to the plan rather than responding to outside pressures . . . like losing the first two games of the league.”

Took off on a run

In 2018, Limerick finally emerged from Division 1B, ran Tipperary close in the semi-finals and took off on a run that led to their first All-Ireland in 45 years. The next season, they won the league but a few weeks later lost the opening championship round-robin fixture to Cork.

Maybe that too was instructive, as the All-Ireland defence ended in what remains their last defeat in the championship.

Winning the league in 2020 was straightforward as the final doubled up with the first round of that year’s winter championship against Clare.

It’s not just that Munster is harder to negotiate but also that the round-robin format carries its own challenges. Small wonder that Kiely wasn’t going to be deflected by the prospect of losing league matches.

Of the teams that reached the league semi-finals, none prospered at the weekend. Westmeath, who proved competitive for a while against Kilkenny, had come out of a successful Division 2A campaign but the four Division 1 semi-finalists struggled.

Kilkenny wouldn’t have been happy with their first half. Waterford had a near-death experience. Cork we know about and Wexford, whose league exit was the most traumatic, fell on their feet in conjuring a draw with Galway, having been dominated for most of the match.

Maybe it’s extreme to extrapolate the redundancy of nearly a century of competition from the first weekend of action but that’s how the champions and favourites for three-in-a-row see it.

Limerick were well suited to the pandemic-enforced return of the knockout-and-qualifiers format: a handful of matches at regular intervals but their ability to plan a championship and taper preparations so that they give their best performances on the biggest days has been mesmerising.

What will all of this mean for next year’s league? If the emerging message is that winning matches in the spring can undermine teams for championship, Division 1 will resemble a seven-week slow bicycle race.

Limerick after all have chosen that this is just what it means.

sean.moran@irishtimes.com