Leinster SHC 2016

[burdizzo]

The Offaly 'keeper made a couple of great saves in the first half, for sure, but it felt like Laoise were lucky enough to be level at half-time - though, to be fair, they clawed back a five-point deficit to be one up approaching half-time. There was one sequence late in the first-half when Offaly looked certain to get a goal, only for some amazing saving blocks to come in. Sort of lifted them a bit. Of course, the second half was a write-off, and the only good thing from a Leix point of view was a couple of great scores from Cha. Otherwise, there's nothing to say, except that Offaly looked good, and Leix looked dire. I think it's more of the latter, to be honest, and it's back to the bad old days again. Maybe they DO need the round robin games - though on today's performance, they wouldn't even get out of that.

[Keyser Söze]

I think it is more than today's result.
Minors beaten by Offaly,
U21s beaten by Carlow,
Seniors beaten twice by Kerry & twice by Offaly.

To lose all of the games above is an unqualified disaster of a year. It gives the appearance of no progress after years of hard work and positivity.
When things started to go wrong we just didn't know how to hurl without the sweeper at the back and got totally opened up.

I don't know what the answers are.

[G@@]

we are a seeded team, should be winning this one in our stride, offaly a border line ring cup team, their fans living in the past, cannot see that they now have plonk as compared to the champagne of the past.

not to bad for a border line ring cup team are we cuckoo 

Enjoy your kick, ya sad little p***k.  You're quiet enough when things don't go your way.  It's a sad state when your own supporters are ashamed of your inputs.  Can't wait for your pre/post Galway views, that will be riveting. Pond-life.

[redsetanta]

Second half today made for hard viewing. Had ourselves set up rightly after going in level at half time. Said to a lad beside me that even though O'Connor Park has been a bit of a graveyard for Laois teams if you were a gambling man you'd back Laois  even though our record is so bad. Jaysus we were looking so good at half time after playing into that breeze. What the f**k went so badly wrong???

[zoner]

I think Ched's excuse of this being a young team is wearing thin when you look to what Waterford are doing. Frustrating, having said that a couple of breaks didn't go our way at critical times. Attention turns to the back door with Cork, Clare, Wexford & Westmeath you couldn't be too confident.

[theoldvet]

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TOMMY CONLON SUNDAY INDEPENDENT,    THAT SAID IT ALL.
 
All the joyful optimism they banked from their miraculous defeat of Kilkenny in the Leinster under 21 championship 10 days ago will eventually run into the sand. It will dissipate into frustration and disappointment as they experience the reality of life in one of hurling's perennial backwaters.

 
Seasons will slip by in circles of apathy and anonymity. They will spend most of their time down where the buses don't run, where the crowds don't appear, playing bad games against poor teams. They might get the odd day out in the championship.

More probably they will take beatings that border on the embarrassing. Managers will come and go. Players will come and go, demoralised by the futility of it all.

 
By the time they've reached their mid-20s, the sheer thrill they enjoyed that May evening in 2016 will seem like a moment of lost innocence. In their dejected adulthood they might even look back and marvel at their naivete at the time. They had all sorts of dreams of future glory but here they are now, turned cynical by the treadmill of mediocrity, wondering if it's worth another year of their time, what with the job and the girlfriend and the mortgage.

We have all seen this movie played out over and over, in hurling and Gaelic football. A minnow county happens upon a good underage generation; they pull off a few improbable victories and for a brief, glorious time, the limelight is theirs. Then they cross the bridge into the senior universe, the world of hardened men and big-game talents - and they discover the hard way that it's not a bridge they're trying to cross, but a chasm.

 
What's worse is that we all collude in feeding them this lie. Everyone pumps them full of hope at this age. It is the mythical narrative on which the GAA sustains itself: the romantic notion of The Breakthrough being just around the corner for the weaker county, the smaller parish, if they just push that little bit harder and try that little bit more.

It doesn't take a lot to peddle this line. One or two wins in a given season are enough. These are the straws that are clutched as signs of progress, harbingers of better things, staging posts to the glory that awaits just over the next hill.

 
The win in question will be billed as "a great boost for . . . " - fill in your own blanks here. That remarkable two-point victory for the under 21s was, of course, "a great boost for Westmeath hurling". In recent years we've had great boosts for Carlow hurling and Laois hurling and Fermanagh hurling and Longford hurling and even Warwickshire hurling. Yesterday Louth played Sligo in the Lory Meagher Cup final. Naturally, the winning team will have given a great boost to Sligo or Louth hurling, God bless the mark.

What will never be said is that none of these counties, and plenty more like them, will ever get close to becoming contenders at the top end of the game. Most of them have traditionally struggled to contend in football, by far the more popular of the Gaelic sports in their counties.

 
Westmeath football has won one senior Leinster title in over 120 years of trying. And it has the whole county from which to pick its players. Westmeath hurling has 13 or 14 clubs to choose from in total. "That's only as big as the West Waterford division," said Michael Ryan, their senior hurling manager, last week. "That's the size of the hurling fraternity (in Westmeath)".

What will never be said either is that this is a hopeless situation. What will never be said is that the playing population in so many of these counties is simply too small; and therefore that their teams will rarely be good enough for anything but the crumbs from the table.

 
The talk instead is always of putting the right structures in place, strategies for underage development, more coaching and promotion etc, etc. But all of these initiatives continually and forever run into the brick wall of demographics - player population.

The one idea that could make a meaningful difference, that might actually help the minnows put competitive teams on the field, is the one idea that remains taboo: breaking down the county boundaries. Allowing the free movement of players between counties. What if, for example, some top club hurlers in Kilkenny or Galway were allowed play county hurling, if they fancied it, for Carlow or Westmeath? Players perhaps not quite good enough to make their own home squads but who'd like to compete at county level and would get the chance to do so with another team?

 
But the notion remains apparently unthinkable. The principle of playing for your home county is such a sacred tenet, so embedded in the GAA's communal psyche, that few people appear ready to question it. The counties who suffer most from this demographic disadvantage have seemingly become so conditioned to their place in the pecking order that they don't challenge it either.

Let's hope the Westmeath under 21s are enjoying their moment in the sun, because sadly it might never shine on them again.

Sunday Indo Sport
Follow @IndoSport

[OTF]

There it is in a nutshell, this whole idea of teams representing counties ( formed in the 16th century)is so unfair it's ridiculous.

But we all feed into and support it, like the shite we had to read and listen last w/e about the dubs and the great colour they brought to Kilkenny. Their first championship game away from home in 10 yrs  ffs     What other sport would allow such an advantage.

Just imagine trying to explain our structures to an outsider........ I suspect he'd say we're of our f****n heads and he'd be right.
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TOMMY CONLON SUNDAY INDEPENDENT,    THAT SAID IT ALL.
 
All the joyful optimism they banked from their miraculous defeat of Kilkenny in the Leinster under 21 championship 10 days ago will eventually run into the sand. It will dissipate into frustration and disappointment as they experience the reality of life in one of hurling's perennial backwaters.

 
Seasons will slip by in circles of apathy and anonymity. They will spend most of their time down where the buses don't run, where the crowds don't appear, playing bad games against poor teams. They might get the odd day out in the championship.

More probably they will take beatings that border on the embarrassing. Managers will come and go. Players will come and go, demoralised by the futility of it all.

 
By the time they've reached their mid-20s, the sheer thrill they enjoyed that May evening in 2016 will seem like a moment of lost innocence. In their dejected adulthood they might even look back and marvel at their naivete at the time. They had all sorts of dreams of future glory but here they are now, turned cynical by the treadmill of mediocrity, wondering if it's worth another year of their time, what with the job and the girlfriend and the mortgage.

We have all seen this movie played out over and over, in hurling and Gaelic football. A minnow county happens upon a good underage generation; they pull off a few improbable victories and for a brief, glorious time, the limelight is theirs. Then they cross the bridge into the senior universe, the world of hardened men and big-game talents - and they discover the hard way that it's not a bridge they're trying to cross, but a chasm.

 
What's worse is that we all collude in feeding them this lie. Everyone pumps them full of hope at this age. It is the mythical narrative on which the GAA sustains itself: the romantic notion of The Breakthrough being just around the corner for the weaker county, the smaller parish, if they just push that little bit harder and try that little bit more.

It doesn't take a lot to peddle this line. One or two wins in a given season are enough. These are the straws that are clutched as signs of progress, harbingers of better things, staging posts to the glory that awaits just over the next hill.

 
The win in question will be billed as "a great boost for . . . " - fill in your own blanks here. That remarkable two-point victory for the under 21s was, of course, "a great boost for Westmeath hurling". In recent years we've had great boosts for Carlow hurling and Laois hurling and Fermanagh hurling and Longford hurling and even Warwickshire hurling. Yesterday Louth played Sligo in the Lory Meagher Cup final. Naturally, the winning team will have given a great boost to Sligo or Louth hurling, God bless the mark.

What will never be said is that none of these counties, and plenty more like them, will ever get close to becoming contenders at the top end of the game. Most of them have traditionally struggled to contend in football, by far the more popular of the Gaelic sports in their counties.

 
Westmeath football has won one senior Leinster title in over 120 years of trying. And it has the whole county from which to pick its players. Westmeath hurling has 13 or 14 clubs to choose from in total. "That's only as big as the West Waterford division," said Michael Ryan, their senior hurling manager, last week. "That's the size of the hurling fraternity (in Westmeath)".

What will never be said either is that this is a hopeless situation. What will never be said is that the playing population in so many of these counties is simply too small; and therefore that their teams will rarely be good enough for anything but the crumbs from the table.

 
The talk instead is always of putting the right structures in place, strategies for underage development, more coaching and promotion etc, etc. But all of these initiatives continually and forever run into the brick wall of demographics - player population.

The one idea that could make a meaningful difference, that might actually help the minnows put competitive teams on the field, is the one idea that remains taboo: breaking down the county boundaries. Allowing the free movement of players between counties. What if, for example, some top club hurlers in Kilkenny or Galway were allowed play county hurling, if they fancied it, for Carlow or Westmeath? Players perhaps not quite good enough to make their own home squads but who'd like to compete at county level and would get the chance to do so with another team?

 
But the notion remains apparently unthinkable. The principle of playing for your home county is such a sacred tenet, so embedded in the GAA's communal psyche, that few people appear ready to question it. The counties who suffer most from this demographic disadvantage have seemingly become so conditioned to their place in the pecking order that they don't challenge it either.

Let's hope the Westmeath under 21s are enjoying their moment in the sun, because sadly it might never shine on them again.

Sunday Indo Sport
Follow @IndoSport

[finbar o tool]

TOMMY CONLON SUNDAY INDEPENDENT,    THAT SAID IT ALL.
 
All the joyful optimism they banked from their miraculous defeat of Kilkenny in the Leinster under 21 championship 10 days ago will eventually run into the sand. It will dissipate into frustration and disappointment as they experience the reality of life in one of hurling's perennial backwaters.

 
Seasons will slip by in circles of apathy and anonymity. They will spend most of their time down where the buses don't run, where the crowds don't appear, playing bad games against poor teams. They might get the odd day out in the championship.

More probably they will take beatings that border on the embarrassing. Managers will come and go. Players will come and go, demoralised by the futility of it all.

 
By the time they've reached their mid-20s, the sheer thrill they enjoyed that May evening in 2016 will seem like a moment of lost innocence. In their dejected adulthood they might even look back and marvel at their naivete at the time. They had all sorts of dreams of future glory but here they are now, turned cynical by the treadmill of mediocrity, wondering if it's worth another year of their time, what with the job and the girlfriend and the mortgage.

We have all seen this movie played out over and over, in hurling and Gaelic football. A minnow county happens upon a good underage generation; they pull off a few improbable victories and for a brief, glorious time, the limelight is theirs. Then they cross the bridge into the senior universe, the world of hardened men and big-game talents - and they discover the hard way that it's not a bridge they're trying to cross, but a chasm.

 
What's worse is that we all collude in feeding them this lie. Everyone pumps them full of hope at this age. It is the mythical narrative on which the GAA sustains itself: the romantic notion of The Breakthrough being just around the corner for the weaker county, the smaller parish, if they just push that little bit harder and try that little bit more.

It doesn't take a lot to peddle this line. One or two wins in a given season are enough. These are the straws that are clutched as signs of progress, harbingers of better things, staging posts to the glory that awaits just over the next hill.

 
The win in question will be billed as "a great boost for . . . " - fill in your own blanks here. That remarkable two-point victory for the under 21s was, of course, "a great boost for Westmeath hurling". In recent years we've had great boosts for Carlow hurling and Laois hurling and Fermanagh hurling and Longford hurling and even Warwickshire hurling. Yesterday Louth played Sligo in the Lory Meagher Cup final. Naturally, the winning team will have given a great boost to Sligo or Louth hurling, God bless the mark.

What will never be said is that none of these counties, and plenty more like them, will ever get close to becoming contenders at the top end of the game. Most of them have traditionally struggled to contend in football, by far the more popular of the Gaelic sports in their counties.

 
Westmeath football has won one senior Leinster title in over 120 years of trying. And it has the whole county from which to pick its players. Westmeath hurling has 13 or 14 clubs to choose from in total. "That's only as big as the West Waterford division," said Michael Ryan, their senior hurling manager, last week. "That's the size of the hurling fraternity (in Westmeath)".

What will never be said either is that this is a hopeless situation. What will never be said is that the playing population in so many of these counties is simply too small; and therefore that their teams will rarely be good enough for anything but the crumbs from the table.

 
The talk instead is always of putting the right structures in place, strategies for underage development, more coaching and promotion etc, etc. But all of these initiatives continually and forever run into the brick wall of demographics - player population.

The one idea that could make a meaningful difference, that might actually help the minnows put competitive teams on the field, is the one idea that remains taboo: breaking down the county boundaries. Allowing the free movement of players between counties. What if, for example, some top club hurlers in Kilkenny or Galway were allowed play county hurling, if they fancied it, for Carlow or Westmeath? Players perhaps not quite good enough to make their own home squads but who'd like to compete at county level and would get the chance to do so with another team?

 
But the notion remains apparently unthinkable. The principle of playing for your home county is such a sacred tenet, so embedded in the GAA's communal psyche, that few people appear ready to question it. The counties who suffer most from this demographic disadvantage have seemingly become so conditioned to their place in the pecking order that they don't challenge it either.

Let's hope the Westmeath under 21s are enjoying their moment in the sun, because sadly it might never shine on them again.

Sunday Indo Sport
Follow @IndoSport

Rubbish.

So all the weaker counties are just wasting their time? Forever useless?! Proper structures and good coaching will do nothing?? The GAA as an organisation is failing at helping weaker counties get stronger, true. Especially when they are giving Dublin more funding than the rest of the country combined. But its about more than money, its about the GAA top men who dont give a f**k about Louth hurling or Meath hurling or Laois hurling either.
Cant a player go and play with another county by transfer if they wish already? Pending their circumstances etc. How would that help anyway? let our best players go off and play for a better county, and how does that help us? Not to mention a big part of your motivation as a player must be to represent YOUR county, not someone elses.

[Joeythelips]

What a f**king load of bullshit "Let's hope the Westmeath under 21s are enjoying their moment in the sun, because sadly it might never shine on them again."

How about well done Westmeath on beating Kilkenny, oh no wait you guys should not have bothered playing hurling from the age on 6 upwards, it will all lead to nothing anyway. Also we will all die someday so lets not waste anymore time on this forum or anything else and just finish ourselves now for f**k sake.

Its not easy to be competitive in a sport like hurling which has a high level of skill compared to say football where if you are a decent athlete you could could probably make it, but lets look at how a county like Kilkenny are so successful. They are not a county with a huge population who have an abundance of wealth. The main reason is their love of hurling and its taught in all schools throughout the county. Kids are encouraged at an early age to play the game, then when they get older there are good coaching structures in place where they can hone their skills. They can pick the elite for development squads but they also have a pool of talent going into the club championship. If you were to go to a Kilkenny Junior hurling game, the standard would be pretty high.

Schools are a big thing also, but again you need a pool of talent to start with. When Laois won minor All Irelands for the first time in the 90s schools like Ballyfin & Portlaoise had strong sides. Then onto 3rd level where they are competing against the best from other counties and so on. By the time a player reaches the chance to get on the Kilkenny county panel they are of a high standard to begin with.

All this work thats gone into a player who may not even make it is hard work, work by parents, teachers, coaches volunteers but that is whats needed...not the  ara sure we are no fu**kin good anyway and never will be attitude.

[Ogie]

It's back to investment in coaches, schools and clubs with a plan to implement from U6 upwards, this of course requires more money to employ coaches and development officers which the likes of Dublin have for the last 20 years and we need support from Croke Park for this.

Anyway back to Sunday, for now, I feared it was one of our weakest Senior hurling teams to take the field in years,
Our middle 8 were completely dominated, Only Healy in the full back line and Foyle at Full Forward could come out with any credit from the game,

Our hurling, touch, passing were poor, I know we could simply say we're not good enough but how were we not more mentally ready and up for this game, we died after Joe Bergins goal just three in the towel,
We are hurling the sweeper system now for 3 or 4 years and we are still not comfortable with it,

I hope to god we avoid the Munster teams in the qualifier draw, I don't know where we go from here..

Merman, I'd love to hear your take on the weekend & current situation please

[Ballyroan Abbey]

It's

Anyway back to Sunday, for now, I feared it was one of our weakest Senior hurling teams to take the field in years,
Our middle 8 were completely dominated, Only Healy in the full back line and Foyle at Full Forward could come out with any credit
Surely cha has to get some credit, showed a bit of fight

[Dave like the tv channel]

Draw:

Wexford v Offaly
Westmeath v Limerick
Clare v Laois
Cork v Dublin

[burdizzo]

Against Clare was one of their better showings in the league, but then again, that was at home... Yikes!

[blueandwhite1]

Worst possible draw!! Clare are hurting badly after the manner in which Waterford beat them and a bit like in 2013, they will be absolutely gunning for a huge victory at home, and will be ruthless. We will have to hurl the game of our lives to keep things close. Not that there were any easy draws but this is going to be tough.

[burdizzo]

Wexford at home might have been manageable, but beyond that...