GAELIC GAMES:They had a hot time in the old town last night. Strange that this long hot April should have put an end to a long drought. On a parched but pretty pitch at Semple Stadium yesterday Waterford, without a national title since 1963, seized the Allianz National Hurling League. Joy was unconfined. The hurling nation has a sudden thirst for what wonders might gush from the pending summer.
This was a white-knuckle ride, a cliffhanger, a thriller. A real game in a competition which often ends with a phoney war. It took two points in tension-filled injury time to decide the winner. One from Eoin Kelly was a perfect hurling moment, fit to win any great game. The other, from Séamus Prendergast, was a grace note played sweetly in the Thurles air. Then all hell (or heaven) broke loose as the final whistle shrilled.
It's one of the more threadbare cliches by now but in most years the league can mean whatever you want it to mean. Not this year, though. Yesterday's final was graced by the aristocrats of Kilkenny, a side whose desire and ability are beyond question under any circumstance. Looking for their third league title in a row, Kilkenny raised the intensity of the game to a point where Waterford had to answer every question worth asking of a team.
Nothing fazed Waterford, though. They seemed happily unhaunted by the failures of their recent past when big games have slipped away from them when the gauge got turned up a few notches.
At half-time the consensus was that at two points ahead and having clearly rattled the All-Ireland champions Waterford would never have a better chance of glory. Then they permitted Kilkenny to score the first five points of the second half. All around the ground heads shook in resignation.
Waterford had been to National League finals twice since the start of their current renaissance. They met with nothing but grief in 1998 and 2004. Waterford in recent years have somehow seemed to become weakened by an allergy to the higher altitudes. Yesterday Kilkenny seemed to sense their weakness after the break and sent out the message that there was no place to hide and no place to rest until such time as the singing of the fat lady could be heard. Grown men in the attendance of 22,235 winced at what was about to happen.
History justified pessimism. Kilkenny's last league final defeat was back in 1978 on a day when Clare beat them. Kilkenny have won the league title nine times in the interim. Ironically, Justin McCarthy, always the missionary, was in the Clare dugout for that long-ago coup.
McCarthy had a good day yesterday. The decision to stick with John Mullane and Dan Shanahan when both were struggling during the game paid dividends late on. It's not so long ago that McCarthy would have had little choice but to stick with both players so sparse was the talent sitting on the bench behind him. Yesterday though, McCarthy could glance around and be reassured by the sight of men like Tom Feeney, Paul Flynn, Eoin McGrath, Dave Bennett and Shane O'Sullivan champing at the bit.
It's the measure of his achievement as a coach that in a county whose underage system isn't quite the envy of the nation he had those players on the bench and players like Stephen Molumphy, Shane Walsh and Aidan Kearney playing significant roles on the field. Kearney, in particular, was a revelation and many people's idea of what a man-of-the-match performance should be about.
Oddly, Kilkenny, the Ford Motors of hurling assembly lines, reached for only two substitutions when the game was up for grabs, and neither Eoin Larkin nor Eoin McCormack impacted the shape of the game at all. Justin McCarthy had the pleasure of seeing Paul Flynn and Eoin McGrath score key points within minutes of their arrival in the second half.
"I was quietly confident, to be honest," said Justin afterwards. "I felt we had the team to do it. I felt we had the experienced players. It was all about working hard, not giving in, matching them score for score."
It was indeed. On an afternoon which lacked the punctuation of goals Waterford needed to score 20 points to win. That they had six wides in the first quarter of an hour (and 11 in all) was an index of how much ball they chiselled out during the afternoon.
Kilkenny's manager Brian Cody reacted with his customary grace to this rare setback.
"Waterford are a very fine side," he said. "They never panicked when things got tough for them today. Nobody should be surprised that they are the league champions."
Nobody who has watched them through this league could be surprised, yet the quality of the game in which they took the title and the manner in which they responded to setbacks will have surprised many. Good times. Summer calls for more.
