There is no consolation when 61 years turns into another one and there’s no knowing when the chance might come around again and Liam Cahill doesn’t pretend like there is.
Not when the only All-Ireland hurling final he could make count was the was one that just played out in front of him, and for that Cahill makes no excuse either, the Tipperary native, is his first season as Waterford manager, unreserved in his assessment the better team had just won.
Instead Cahill takes some immediate stock of Waterford’s 11-point defeat, in a game that did produce 49 points, only no goals – for only the third time in All-Ireland hurling final history
Losing the pillar of his defensive play Tadhg De Búrca, after 20 minutes, wasn’t the winning or losing of it, De Búrca himself perhaps defiant in his body language as he limped off, not entirely disguising the body-blow it must have felt like for Waterford.
“Yeah, for a man who has tried unbelievably hard to get back into the shape he was in, the way he was, after having a cruciate knee ligament already last year,” said Cahill. “My initial reaction would be that it’s not good, I hope [tomorrow] we find out it’s not too drastic.”
By then Cahill will have taken stock of simple statistics too: of their 40 scoring chances from play, Limerick converted 24; of their 22 chances, Waterford converted only eight.
“Bitterly disappointed, yeah, but we were so well marshalled, throughout the game, and the better team won.”
Waterford had their goals chances, true, only in truth Limerick came closest to scoring it, after 12 minutes, denied by two brilliant saves from Stephen O’Keeffe, firstly from Kyle Hayes, then the rebound from Cian Lynch.
“When you get to an All-Ireland final, you have to be putting away chances. I know we were clutching at straws early on. We did get one or two genuine goal chances, and for us to win we needed to be scoring 2-20, 2-22.
Game plan
“Limerick played with such a game plan, that they had so many options and there were so many fellas we had to keep an eye on and they were creating these overlaps, and I suppose we were concentrating on them so much it’s very hard to implement your own game style. But we came today to have a real cut and in fairness to my lads, I have to really say they went right to end.”
The turning of the game was that third-quarter, when Limerick outscored them 10 points to three: “I think yeah, immediately after half-time I expected a real response from us, I thought it gave us the opportunity to try to correct a few things that were going wrong for us. But Limerick started the second half a lot better than we did, gathered real momentum from there, and we were always chasing the match after that.
“So it was a really difficult day, they’re a really powerful outfit and we picked a bad day really to lose our bit of consistency and our choices and our decisions on the ball. I think that was maybe nearly the pressure that we were playing under.
“I know the scoreboard wasn’t pretty at the end but I know that they gave it everything. Looking at them from the line they emptied their stomachs to try to cling in there and do the right things. It wasn’t from the want of trying. We’ll just have to dust ourselves down, go again, but there are plenty of young hurlers in Waterford, and these guys will have learned a lot from this year, and we’ll do our utmost to come back again.”
