Hurling Championship 2019

[manfromdelmonte]

Then they don't know their history

Dublin hurling teams have put in performances like this in the past.

[Muck Savage]

It seems a very bizarre system that two Leinster teams who didn't even make the round robin can bypass the whole thing and make a quarter final. Surely it would make more sense that they would earn their right to qualify for the round robin through the joe McDonagh and then fight it out like everyone else. You'd feel bad for Carlow who's reward for making it to the round robin is getting dumped out early. Whereas Westmeath make the quarter final based on, not even winning, but being runners up in the Joe McDonagh. I'm all for promoting the sport in more counties, but this just seems like placing a handicap on teams for doing better.

Quarter finals are next weekend, Laois have earned the right by beating Dublin. Both Laois and Wastmeath made the 'eighth' finals.
They both earned the right to play today, the top brass thought they'd get hammered I'm sure but a bone was thrown to the Joe Mac cup teams. I'm sure we will see this change soon enough.
The system is fine, gives teams an opportunity to progress while still in the AI series. The most unfair area is that The bottom team in Leinster go down each year, there really should be a playoff with the bottom Munster team, but again an effort to protect the tradition counties.

[Muck Savage]

P.S. fair play Laois, showed a lot of spirit today. Hope they can give Tipp a rattle now.

[Mossy Bruce]

P.S. fair play Laois, showed a lot of spirit today. Hope they can give Tipp a rattle now.

Not sure if my blue and white heart could handle another match like today. 

[laoislad]

P.S. fair play Laois, showed a lot of spirit today. Hope they can give Tipp a rattle now.

We're in bonus territory now, nothing to lose and all the pressure will be on Tipp. Can't see us beating them but it won't matter as this season has been a massive success what ever happens.

[Tony Baloney]

Pity that match wasn't on tv. Some result. The Queen will be on the Pimms tonight.

[Boycey]

Buff Egan's SnapChat is better than any tv coverage 

[macdanger2]

Great win for Laois, fair play

[Milltown Row2]

Laois answered my question, the difference was shown today. Eddie is a factor but this Laois team have a lot of leaders and players confident to take on teams and shoot, their intensity was needed. They need to bring that to the next game.

Dublin had they won would have went in to the 'next' game confident that they'd put it up to or beat Tipp. Eddie needs to instil that again

[imtommygunn]

Having watched a few highlights of Westmeath Laois I think without killian Doyle Westmeath may have shipped a very heavy beating so Laois, this year, were probably quite a bit above the rest in the McDonagh cup.

[Capt Pat]

A great win for Laois today making me look like an idiot in the process.

[marty34]

Well done Laois - super performance.  Showed big heart after Dublin drew level with 10mins to go.  They pushed on with 3 pts of their own: that showed serious character as they could have folded at that stage and said 'we've give it a rattle etc'.

Hope they can rest up this week and go again V Tipp next week-end.

[Ball Hopper]

Good discussion here...still a bit of tension seeping through.  Tommy Walsh and Seán Óg Ó hAilpín discuss the KK/Cork rivalry from 2003-2009 or so on OTB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uo8uILgt_k

[seafoid]

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/hurling/nicky-english-kilkenny-look-fine-tuned-while-tipp-still-off-key-1.3956539

Nicky English: Kilkenny look fine tuned while Tipp still off key
Greater intensity in Leinster championship vindicated as brittle Cork are shattered

Nicky English


Three teams came to Croke Park looking for some form of redemption and another on a lap of honour, which they duly achieved with flying colours, but only one of the others found what they wanted.
It has been a sub-plot of the championship as to how the provincial championships measure up to each other. I had come to the suspicion that although Leinster wasn't as aesthetically pleasing as Munster and certainly not in the same category as a score-fest, it had been tougher and more intense.
That was more or less vindicated by the first quarter-final between Kilkenny and Cork. At first it looked like Cork were more menacing and better at creating space for the likes of Darragh Fitzgibbon and Mark Coleman to get on the ball and there were red lights flashing inside with Patrick Horgan and Alan Cadogan unmarkable.
They made a great start but inevitably Kilkenny dug in and Cork had problems. The team missed goals by taking wrong options and ultimately undermined themselves by bad wides and poor decision making. Too many players were not playing well and Mark Ellis was under pressure even if Stephen McDonnell's hard work marking TJ Reid was a rare positive for them.
This was the strongest Kilkenny team of the championship and there was an expectation of improved performance based on the likely contributions of Cillian Buckley, Richie Hogan and Walter Walsh.
Physical presence
It didn't work out for Buckley, whose return from injury has been fitful, but Hogan took his goal well and looks to be coming back into form at just the right time and there was a huge contribution from Walsh when he came on for the second half and was able to use his physical presence to disrupt the Cork defence.
The second-half response of Kilkenny was emphatic and they destroyed the Cork re-starts. When Anthony Nash went short, he used Seán O'Donoghue, who got caught in possession and was turned over, and when he went long Kilkenny were eating the puck-outs.
They managed just one point in 20 minutes and then Horgan, unusually on the day, hit a desperately poor wide and the whole game looked as if it was over. It was to his credit that he ended up inspiring the Cork comeback but ultimately Kilkenny seized the day.
They were cynical when they had to be and knew how to battle whereas maybe we've seen this before from Cork – disappointing ends to the season in Croke Park. Conor Lehane was replace again on Sunday and when the chips were down, there was too much inconsistency across the team performance.
They were massively dependent on Horgan to pull them through and he gave a tour de force, in fairness to him, but on the day Kilkenny looked to be an improving force, with their injuries clearing up among experienced players.
This win was all the more impressive for the fact that TJ Reid wasn't expected to fight fires all around the place. He was well man-marked again, this time by Stephen McDonnell but whereas against Wexford when Matt O'Hanlon did well on him, he didn't have the support, this time he did and Brian Cody will be rightly pleased.
They've found the much sought-after redemption but more crucially they have momentum and while Limerick are still All-Ireland favourites, you know 100 per cent that they're in for a major battle against Kilkenny in the semi-final – at the very minimum.
Heroics
The second quarter-final was always going to be a difficult match for Tipperary. They were always expected to win and there had been a lot of love for Laois after their heroics the previous week.
More worrying from a Tipp perspective is the ever more pronounced lack of pattern to their play. They got the early couple of goals and looked like they should kick on from there but their problems were almost exacerbated in the second half after Laois lost a man.
At this stage there's a conflict of styles on the Tipperary side, really. They haven't embraced the demands of the short game, playing through the lines, as other teams – even Kilkenny to a certain extent – have because they should have been able to work the ball through from the puck-out.
They had a couple of spare men in defence and should have been able to build it from there but that wasn't happening. That's a key worry.
The second concern I'd have is the concession of frees, which was the Achilles heel of an otherwise strong display in Cork back in May. You could say that the referee was much too fussy and there's no doubt about that but at the same time, Tipperary are simply conceding too many frees. That's been a trend, regardless of the refereeing.
I didn't expect them to respond well to the defeat in Limerick because the lost momentum was always going to be a problem but I thought that there would be some signs of recovery. Instead many of the same players who under-performed in Limerick, didn't find anything better against Laois.
It's worth remarking on how hard Laois fought after three incredibly intense weeks. Ross King took his goal very well and Mark Kavanagh punished the Tipp indiscipline.
After a brilliant season under Eddie Brennan, the lap of honour was richly deserved.

[seafoid]

Jackie Tyrrell: All-Ireland semi-final is the worst stage to lose at
Subscriber only
https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/hurling/jackie-tyrrell-all-ireland-semi-final-is-the-worst-stage-to-lose-at-1.3967488

Limerick won't beat Kilkenny unless they match their rivals' insatiable will to win
about 5 hours ago

Jackie Tyrrell

0


Wexford's Kevin Foley in action against Tipperary's Noel McGrath during the league. If Tipp can limit Foley's influence and keep his possessions under 10 to 12 they have a great chance. Photograph: Tommy Dickson/Inpho

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I always felt All-Ireland semi-finals were like when you were a young teenager, full of life and mischief as you walked up to a nightclub door and approached the bouncers, bursting with excitement about how the night would unfold. Suddenly the large hand of the bouncer would be shoved in your face at the door.
"Not tonight, son."
Disaster.
All-Ireland semi-finals feel like that because you arrive at them in hope rather than in expectation. You have earned nothing yet. Nobody owes you a place in an All-Ireland final and everything you've done up to that point counts for nothing. You're either getting through the door or you're not.
Losing the match was like getting refused because you had no ID. It was the biggest letdown and your world came crashing to a stop there and then. It was like you could see in the door of the nightclub and see your friends drinking away and having great fun without giving you a second's thought.
You could hear the music as the strobe lights spilled out the door onto your miserable face and you weren't taking part in any of it. You had convinced your parents to let you out, bought the nice new clobber and saved up the money. And it was all for nothing.
All-Ireland semi-finals are the worse stage to lose at. You're left in limbo having been so close. You head off into the winter with nothing to hold onto. Your year is over at the worst possible time, just when you're within touching distance of the thing you've been obsessed with for eight months. The what-ifs come from all sides of your mind and squat there until you can muster up the strength and energy to evict them.
I always said I'd prefer to be gone before a semi-final than to lose one. If your summer ends in a quarter-final or a qualifier, then you just weren't good enough that year.
You don't spend the winter wondering, you just knuckle down and bury it and promise yourself not to let it happen again. A semi-final defeat – unless you get a tanking – just leaves you wondering.
If you lose a final, well at least you got there. At least you made it to the day in the calendar that you had circled from the very start of pre-season. Any game can go any way on a given day so if you lose a final, well, that's sport. But a semi-final defeat is just oblivion, neither here nor there. It's the friend zone. You don't want to be in the friend zone.
Extra defender
The prize for the weekend's winners is a place on the steps of greatness, touching distance of the holy grail.
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So the prize this weekend is huge for the four teams involved. When I look deeply at the two games, I see a couple of completely different types of encounters.
Both games will involve a massive amount of preparation with a huge focus from management teams on tactics, hours of thought put into their teams, data on each stat, how each team will play, set-ups, match-ups, substitutes, shapes and all the rest of it. But to the naked eye, that tactical prep will be a lot more visible in the Wexford v Tipp game.
Laois probably did Tipperary a bit of a favour in setting up in a fairly similar way to how Wexford do. You could visibly see traces of how Tipperary will take on Wexford in parts of the Laois game. Laois deployed an extra defender and so Tipperary smartly used that game to explore the potential of a different type of sweeper in Brendan Maher.
Lee Chin: Wexford possess huge pace and athleticism in attack with Chin, Diarmuid O'Keeffe, Rory O'Connor, Liam Óg McGovern, Cathal Dunbar and Aidan Nolan from the bench. Photograph: Tommy Dickson/Inpho
They also allowed their two corner-backs Cathal Barrett and Alan Flynn to hunt down the withdrawn Laois attackers and to follow them out into the jungle that is the middle third. When they were out there, they weren't just marking their men – they were actually contesting breaking ball in that sector and feeding on scraps.
The norm would be to sit on their own 65 and wait for them to come back into the Tipperary half before engaging with them. It was aggressive from Tipperary but it shows the bravery and innovation they possess. It will be interesting to see do they put it into action now against Wexford, who will obviously be a step up from Laois.
Tipperary have seen this type of team before – Waterford, Wexford in the league – so they know what comes with the territory. They're not strangers to finding a way around a team playing with an extra defender. Go back to the 2016 Munster final and they actually played over Tadhg De Burca, rather than around him.
But they will need to heed the warning that there are more strings to this Wexford team's bow now. In year three of Davy's term, they are a better conditioned team than when he started. Their physicality was very evident in the Leinster final where they were strong in the tackle and made full use of the big men they have all over the pitch.
Electric pace
They go looking for work and at all times they want make the game into a physical encounter. On top of that, they only shot three wides all day against Kilkenny. That sort of accuracy is pretty much unheard of in a high-stakes, nip-and-tuck game like that.
They vary their puck-outs, going short and running through the lines, going mid-range to Diarmuid O'Keeffe and Shaun Murphy and going long to catching targets like Lee Chin and Conor McDonald.
They biggest area of opportunity Wexford can use is the electric pace they have in abundance from midfield up. They possess huge pace and athleticism in O'Keeffe, Chin, Rory O'Connor, Liam Óg McGovern, Cathal Dunbar and Aidan Nolan from the bench. With Kevin Foley deploying a deep lying position that offers up huge space in the Tipperary defence and one thing Croke Park does is expose any lack of pace. I know it only too well – I spent 14 years trying to escape this trap, fire-fighting against pacy corner-forwards.
So how should the Tipperary defenders deal with it? There are times when you have to roll the dice. You can be in a vulnerable position, with space all around you and feeling isolated but that's the time to be brave and push up on the forward's shoulder.
First to the ball is key, deny them clean primary possession. JJ Delaney had a pain in his ear from me barking at him – as soon as his foot stepped over our own 65 an alarm went off in my mind. Stop! Back! I wouldn't let him pass it and that had the same knock-on message to Michael Fennelly in front of him and Eoin Larkin as well. It meant you played and defended as a unit.
There will be times when it's one-on-one and the Tipperary defence need to be brave
I was never offered the luxury of an extra defender beside me but I didn't want it. I was brought up in a culture of testing your defensive skills and instincts to cope with the best attackers. I felt an easy option was an extra defender and that you weren't using all the coaching and time and effort invested in you as a player. It was a vote of no confidence in you as a defender.
Wexford will give Tipperary an extra defender and it will be a security blanket for plenty of the game. But there will be times when it's one-on-one and the Tipperary defence need to be brave, play on the front foot and play as a unit, covering for each other. If they limit Kevin Foley's influence and keep his possessions under 10 to 12 they have a great chance. For Wexford, hitting three wides is a hugely impressive stat but replicating it is even harder.
The trenches
With Limerick and Kilkenny, the various tactical manoeuvrings won't be as evident but they're still crucial. The devil will be in the detail. Both teams will have deep-lying half-forward lines that will practically mark each other across the middle of Croke Park.
That space between the 65s will be totally compressed, bodies upon bodies. And that's where the game will be won and lost. Covering each other's half-back lines, so they can drop off deep and cut off the channels to the two inside forwards on either side. A game of possession and distribution, dictated by who wins in the trenches around the middle.
Kyle Hayes. Himself and Gearóid Hegarty do a crucial job for Limerick with their imposing physicality and ball-winning around the crucial middle third. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho
The key players here for Limerick are Kyle Hayes and Gearóid Hegarty. They use their physicality so well in this area, getting in around the ball, winning it when the bodies are flying all around them and then, crucially, always being able to turn and find Declan Hannon, Diarmaid Byrnes or Cian Lynch in space to laser ball into Limerick's inside line.
Kilkenny have plenty of strong, physical players in this regard too but it's Hayes and Hegarty who generally dictate matters in around here. Kilkenny have to break even against them to have a chance. If they do, then the quality of ball going into Colin Fennelly and Richie Hogan in the full-forward line improves and Kilkenny's chances improve accordingly.
Kilkenny haven't lost an All-Ireland semi-final since 2005
Limerick probably have the edge on form, on consistency, on the momentum they're building as they go on collecting trophies. But Kilkenny haven't lost an All-Ireland semi-final since 2005. They've made the last four 10 times since then and always made the final. These are different players at different stages in their careers but they have that one constant – the man in charge and the effort he demands from them.
Kilkenny will die with their boots on. Limerick won't beat them unless they do the same.