The weekend seemed to confirm what we suspected: that the last game in Munster's SHC will be between Waterford and Limerick. The real intrigue now is the race for third.
AS unloved as it was, you have to love its legacy.
The Super 8s may not have really worked in football but it has certainly worked for hurling.
In case you’d forgotten or never even recognised it before, if it wasn't for Páraic Duffy’s brainchild of some kind of championship round-robin for the big ball, we’d still be waiting for the one we now have in the small ball. Though some observers, like this very column, were calling as far back as 20 years ago for the format we now have, it took Duffy’s proposal for Hurling Man, or at least enough of his brethren, to be suitably outraged and stirred enough to demand the necessary change.
From that fear of being swamped by football, we now have weekends like this past one where hurling swamps football, and will most likely for at least another month if not two.
After that fear was quenched, others arose. Four years ago there were concerns from traditionalists that with every side guaranteed a second chance, even a fourth game, in the province, it would harm not help attendances. Yet there we had it again on Sunday: both Walsh Park and the Park essentially packed to capacity.
In the coming weeks, Ennis and Limerick will be similarly thronged. And not just because there’s a pent-up demand after Covid to get back taking in games. It’s because of a new dynamic the format has created.
Just like the concluding stages of a Premier League season is often more about the race for fourth as the outcome of the title itself, something similar is at play with the Munster championship now. The weekend seemed to confirm what we suspected: that the last game in Munster will be between Waterford and Limerick. The real intrigue now is the race for third. And just like in England where the scrap for the last Champions League spot could be any of Spurs, United or Arsenal, so it is in Munster between Cork, Tipp and Clare for who wins the last qualifying spot. All may be flawed yet all have a right chance.
After all the optimism of last July and even last month, Cork suddenly find themselves at a similar juncture to where they were a game into the 2019 championship and in danger of their season and team life cycle going the way that one did.
Yet here’s something to ponder: just like Kevin Cashman controversially theorised that in 1996 Limerick were merely the third-best team in Munster (behind Clare and Tipperary, teams that they pipped either by a point or in a replay), there is an argument to be made that while Cork finished up as essentially the second-best team in the country last summer, they may have only been the fourth-best team in their own province.
Indeed if that last-second Kelly-on-Kelly face-off in the Gaelic Grounds had gone a different way Cork may not have been even ranked that high. As they’ve shown in two national semi-finals over the past eight months, Kieran Kingston’s team will feel they can beat any team in Leinster. Their problem and weakness is that every team in Munster feel they can beat them.
That includes the two other sides in the three-horse race for third. While you’ve to go back to the early ’80s when so little was expected from a Tipperary team on the eve of a championship, Sunday showed how Colm Bonnar’s own team has paid little heed to the outside noise and are driven by only their own expectations.
There is a school of thought that having invested so much prep and energy into last Sunday, they may have difficulty raising it again for Clare next Sunday but, if anything, they will be more energised and emboldened from now, knowing how competitive they are. Four years ago in Ennis, Clare had the benefit of having already played a championship game before they took on a Waterford side playing their first of the summer. Now Clare are the ones ring-rusty while their opponents are already up to championship speed.
Brian Lohan showed last year in another Clare-Waterford opener that he has a capacity to get his team primed for their first day of battle but Tipp are already at a pitch that Waterford couldn’t have been last year.
In Leinster we have a similar match-up this weekend in the form of Wexford and Dublin: whoever wins will likely come third in their group.
It all adds up to another brilliant weekend of hurling, one that will feature the first of possibly three Waterford-Limerick clashes this summer.
The weekend features the most attractive bill of football we will have this side of June - Mayo and Galway in Castlebar, plus Donegal and Armagh in Ballybofey. Yet the hurling dwarfs it. As much as three of those four football teams could do with getting to and winning a provincial final and the other, Mayo, could do without another defeat on the back of losing the league final, all are capable of rebounding to reach an All Ireland quarter-final, similar to what they each would have done at least once between 2016 and 2019. Whoever loses the hurling in Thurles and Wexford Park this weekend most likely won’t make it to the All Ireland series. They’re in greater jeopardy, the stakes are higher.
It may no longer be do-or-die, but the beauty of Munster’s own Super 5s is that it feels as if it is.
