At the end of the 2018 season Brian McDonnell, the analyst and coach, produced The Green Monster, a stunning piece of long form analysis on the hurling championship.
The document runs to 12,000 words, logging every heartbeat and muscle movement and brain wave of Limerick’s All-Ireland. The analysis, though, begins with the goalie.
McDonnell illustrated each of Nickie Quaid’s 265 puckouts in three graphics, with coloured dots to denote the outcome.
“Quaid enjoyed an extraordinary season,” wrote McDonnell. “Limerick retained possession on their own puckout 72.25 per cent of the time, which is absolutely ridiculous.”
In their breakthrough season, Quaid’s puckouts were Limerick’s most powerful instrument of control. Their principal puckout targets would have flourished in any era, but that year they were animated by Paul Kinnerk’s imagination and Quaid’s capacity to split an apple with an arrow.
“We started drilling down into it when Seanie O’Donnell came on board [as their lead analyst, in 2017],” says Barry Hennessy, who was first reserve to Quaid for a decade. “The percentage return for Limerick puckouts at that stage was 30-something per cent.”
In less than two years, Limerick’s efficiency doubled. In the long run, those numbers were unsustainable. There is too much transparency and too many camera angles, and too many nimble minds engaged in opposition analysis. Limerick’s point of difference, though, was Quaid. Nobody could shut down his capacity to scramble.
“I know it’s a cliché that the qoalie is the quarterback now,” says Paul Browne, who played with Quaid for nine seasons, “but when you’re watching the NFL playoffs over the last couple of weeks you’d hear fellas saying, ‘that’s a rookie quarterback throw,’ because he’s after throwing it to the wrong place at the wrong time under pressure.
“That’s Nickie’s biggest forte – he’ll hit the right puckout at the right time, under pressure. That only comes with experience, unfortunately.”
Quaid has been the Limerick goalkeeper since 2011. Their championship team has been famously stable over the years, but still, in their five All-Ireland-winning seasons, only four players were ever-present starters: Quaid was one.
At the beginning of November, he won his third All-Star award; a fortnight later he tore his ACL playing soccer with friends. If Limerick reach Croke Park at the beginning of July there is an outside chance that Quaid will be fit to play, but that would mean a rehab of not much more than seven months. David Burke, the Galway centrefielder, managed it, but the typical recovery period is a month longer. In any case, Limerick must plan without him.
The void that Quaid leaves behind comes at a crossroads for this group. Just like the Kilkenny team that failed to win five-in-a-row, they are good enough and just about young enough to win another couple of All-Irelands, as long as there is some judicious pruning and replanting.
John Kiely and Kinnerk have committed for another two years, and O’Donnell is still on board too, all of which is hugely significant. Without these three legs the stool could not stand. But during the close season there was more boardroom turnover in the Limerick set-up than at any other time during Kiely’s eight years in charge.
For the coming season there will be a new strength and conditioning coach, a new performance coach, a new goalkeeping coach and a new nutritionist. O’Donnell had a team of three helping him with analysis; they all stepped away and needed to be replaced. There will also be two new coach/selectors and a different captain.
Declan Hannon had been in that role since Kiely’s second season in charge and in that time Hannon has also been their preferred centre back. He only turned 32 in November, but that number must be set against 14 seasons in the front line. At some point, longevity is more about subtraction than addition. In recent years injuries have become more intrusive, and his form has been more volatile. It is likely that other options at number six will be explored.
But it is certain they will need a new goalkeeper. The problem with replacing Quaid is that he was not just the executor of the puckout strategy he was also its co-creator and curator and its chief critic. That kind of institutional knowledge cannot be replaced.
Browne remembers arriving for training an hour before the appointed time to find Quaid and the other goalkeepers “pumping with sweat because they had an hour’s training done already”. On other nights Quaid would do an hour of video analysis with O’Donnell, just on puckouts.
After the peak of 2018 and 19, Limerick’s puckout efficiency inevitably dipped; other teams came up with workable solutions, which forced Limerick to think again.
“Teams had a plan in place either to push up on Limerick or fill the gaps,” says Hennessy, “so your puckout return would have gone from the high 60s [per cent] down to the 40s.”
Limerick’s response was to re-tool Barry Nash as a play-starter from corner back.
“They’d play it to Nash and he’d play the Nickie Quaid role nearly, with the same movements [up the field], but it was just staggered,” says Barry Cleary, an analyst with GAA Insights, who work with a range of intercounty teams.
That worked spectacularly for a season, but with all these innovations the law of diminishing returns applies. In the second season, Nash was more harassed and disrupted. One of the alternatives that Kinnerk devised was for a fourth Limerick player to drop into the full-back line as a first receiver.
“Kinnerk is a big fan of Man City,” says Cleary “and if you look at the way soccer kick-outs changed where players stand to the side of the goalkeeper [just outside the six yard box] I think he was working off that principle. By bringing Kyle Hayes or Diarmuid Byrnes into the full-back line they’re opening up a gap at wing back which asks a question of the opposition. If you leave that zone free, they’ll run somebody into it.”
But they also had emergency puckouts and Quaid would instinctively know when to push the button.
“You look at the Crusaders [New Zealand rugby team]. Sam Whitlock [their captain] used to talk about what they did when lads’ eyes were starting to glass over,” says Hennessy. “You just make it as simple as possible.
“It would be a case of Gearóid [Hegarty] standing on the sideline [for a puckout] or Diarmuid Byrnes coming into the full back line. Lads would know that if the ball went to Diarmuid it was going to be landing hot and heavy down the field. Those set-ups were more of a trigger to say, ‘Look, we know we’re under pressure. Let’s just relax for a second and get back into the game.’”
Limerick’s puckout numbers returned to the mean over the last three seasons, in part because “everyone else is obsessed with their puckouts,” says Cleary. “The other thing to understand is that if you’re at 50 per cent you’re grand. Tipperary won the 2019 All-Ireland with the worst long puckout in the country – they were winning something like 28 per cent. But they were eating everyone else’s long puckout.”
That is what Limerick have consistently done too. The common pattern in Limerick’s three big defeats since 2019 – against Kilkenny and Cork twice – was that they suffered under their opponents’ long puckouts. In those matches, that trend was the most subversive of all.
In clutch situations, though, Quaid had the wherewithal to find a home for the ball. When they struggled against Kilkenny in the 2022 All-Ireland final he leant on his two favourite receivers: Hegarty and Tom Morrissey. Between them they had 32 possessions. With the goalie, they had that connection.
It will be fascinating to see how it plays out. After injury forced his retirement in 2020 Shane Dowling was restored to the panel this winter, having been reinvented as a goalkeeper with Na Piarsaigh.
“Unbelievable striker of the ball,” says Browne, “and has the accuracy piece to go with it. It’s not a canon, it’s a gun.”
But Jason Gillane was the third goalkeeper for a couple of years behind Quaid and Hennessy, and he was the reserve goalie last year.
“He has everything,” says Hennessy. “A brilliant brain, a brilliant shot-stopper. He’s matured a lot. He was away from the panel for a couple of years, and it hurt him. The only unknown for Limerick is, whoever goes in there, do they have the temperament Nickie has?”
In a pivotal season it is the first big question.
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