Since Limerick started winning All-Irelands under John Kiely nobody has faced them more often than Liam Cahill. Last Sunday’s game in the Gaelic Grounds was their 10th meeting – six games when Cahill was manager of Waterford and now four as Tipperary manager, championship and league.
With all that previous experience in the bank I couldn’t believe that Tipp played with an extra defender. Teams do it because they think it will help them stay in the game when in fact it has the opposite effect. If you give Limerick extra time and space to play out from the back they will just pick you off.
Being able to work the ball under pressure is probably Limerick’s greatest strength so when you allow players like Barry Nash and Declan Hannon the freedom to look up they’ll find a forward every time. The sweeper is taken out of the equation straight away.
I’ve been saying this for years. The only way for teams to give themselves a chance against Limerick is to push up, man-on-man, like Clare have been doing for the last couple of seasons. That takes a bit of courage, and it means that your players in the top half of the field must work extremely hard.
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It also involves an element of risk. You must believe that you have defenders good enough to cope with Limerick’s forwards in one-on-one situations. What you’re trying to do, by pushing up, is make sure that the ball going in is far from perfect.
Tipp failed from every angle. By playing a sweeper they actually gave their defenders less protection. And at the other end of the field, by having one less forward, they weren’t able to create nearly enough scoring chances. Eighteen points against Limerick will hardly keep you going until half-time.
On too many occasions the ball that was sent into the Tipp forward line came straight back out again. Jake Morris was blocked down three times, twice by Kyle Hayes and once by Dan Morrissey. It’s rare enough for a high class intercounty player to be blocked down in the modern game, but three times in the first half alone was something I can’t ever remember seeing.
From Morris, it just looked casual. Limerick don’t give you a second to think. Everything must be done with urgency. All over the field that urgency was missing. To me, Tipp didn’t look like a team that believed they could win the game.
Twelve months ago, in Thurles, they held Limerick to a draw and probably deserved to win that game on the balance of play. Before that, in their two away games, they had beaten Clare and drawn with Cork. At that stage they looked like a team going places.
Now, they look like a team that’s stuck. Ever since they collapsed against Waterford in the final group game last year they’ve been struggling. They were terrible against Galway in the All-Ireland quarter-final, they were completely outplayed by Clare in the league semi-final this year, and they took that form to the Gaelic Grounds last Sunday.
Everything that I heard in the build-up was that Tipp had been flying in training, but we’ve seen this before with teams trained by Cahill. Is the training so hard that it takes away the freshness you need for a championship match? Last Sunday they looked completely flat to me.
After the game Liam Cahill came out and wondered what was wrong with the players. I found that a bit strange. Players obviously take direction and leadership from management and when you hear the boss saying he doesn’t know what’s wrong with his team then where are they going?
If I was one of those players I wouldn’t take kindly to that. As a manager, or as a player, the things that need to be said should be said behind closed doors. To keep Tipp’s season alive, Cahill is going to need those players to go to the wall for him in Walsh Park tomorrow. Questioning them in public wasn’t the smartest approach, in my view.
The manager must take responsibility for the way the team is set up and the players must take responsibility for their performances. I was convinced they would give Limerick a rattle, but the fire I expected to see disappeared after a few minutes. If they bring that kind of attitude to Walsh Park, Tipperary’s season will effectively be over.
For different reasons, it was a strange game in Pearse Stadium too. Galway did well to dig out a draw with two points in stoppage time, but they can’t be happy with the performance. Kilkenny were missing three of their best players – Eoin Murphy, Eoin Cody and Adrian Mullen – and it was a perfect opportunity for Galway to put down a marker.
Derek Lyng might have been unhappy that Kilkenny didn’t close out the game but he would still have been the happier manager at the final whistle. Cody and Mullen are easily worth five or six points to Kilkenny every day.
I was very disappointed with Galway. They almost looked a little heavy legged and at times they lacked composure on the ball, which surprised me. Very late in the game Padraic Mannion and Sean Linnane worked a short puck-out. But instead of using the overlap they had created and working the ball up the field, Mannion drove it wide from his own half. If they want to go far in the championship their composure and game management when chasing a game will need to be better.
Late in the game, when Johnny Glynn was on the edge of the square, they were going route one and landing it on top of him. Glynn is incredibly strong in the air but Galway need to be smarter. Everyone almost senses when Johnny goes to the edge of the square that Galway will go direct, but why not mix it up?
If teams drop back to crowd him out there should be more space around the middle. When the other team knows that Galway are just going direct, those kind of balls are easier to defend. Near the end when Galway were chasing the game a number of balls broke off Gylnn and Whelan but Kilkenny were able to work it out because they funnelled bodies back.
Galway will definitely need to improve and they face a serious test in Wexford Park tomorrow. When Wexford’s backs were to the wall last year they beat Kilkenny in the last round of matches to stay in the Liam MacCarthy Cup. After their loss to Antrim, Wexford have backed themselves into a corner again. I think they must beat Galway to keep their chances of qualifying from Leinster alive. If Galway lose, their place in the Leinster final is suddenly in jeopardy.
