If Limerick were an NFL team, the stats junkies would be sizing them up for a takedown. Their five championship matches so far this year have resulted in a two-point win, two one-point wins, a draw and a one-point defeat. Five games, washing out to an aggregate scoring difference in their favour of just three points.
The advanced metrics dudes would not find that kind of thing impressive. Particularly when you compare it to this point in 2022, when Limerick’s aggregate scoring difference after their fourth Munster title in a row was +24. They certainly wouldn’t look at the numbers and come to the conclusion that Limerick deserve to be odds-on favourites for the All-Ireland.
When the data is trending in a very specific direction like that, it is generally impervious to gut feeling and emotion. If a team who used to blow everybody away has become a team who just about ekes it out against most teams, the smart analysis starts to look elsewhere for the eventual champions. Nothing personal, just the numbers.
Good luck with that, says you. Try being on the Ennis Road in Limerick yesterday around four o’clock and see how far you get with your cold talk and your graphs and figures. The primal, throbbing pulse of another Munster final epic did what it was supposed to do – it went to another place, far beyond the rational and the measurable. It wasn’t a great game – certainly not a patch on the Leinster final that followed it – but it left you feeling gloriously, brutally alive. You can’t ask for more from a sports event.
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Where to now, though? It’s funny how the consensus around the four-week break for provincial champions has been flipped on its head in recent seasons. Time was, you’d be in the Croke Park press conference room after an All-Ireland semi-final and one of the first questions a losing manager would have to answer was, “Did the month off hurt ye?”. Tipperary, Cork (twice), Limerick and Wexford all fell at the semi-final stage towards the end of the last decade and all had to wrestle with the same thought.
There’s none of that around today. Nobody is saying that a month’s break is anything other than good news for Limerick and Kilkenny. John Kiely immediately pounced on it as precisely what Cian Lynch needs to get back to himself. Derek Lyng had to go hunting without four of his starters yesterday and needs every minute between now and July 9th to see what he can do about getting them up and running again.
The big change, of course, has been the round-robin phase. Teams – particularly Munster teams – are having to pour so much of themselves into the provincial campaign that sustaining the effort deep into the season starts to look unviable at a certain point, generally after a defeat. There’s little doubt that’s what happened to Clare in particular last season, when they looked like a Cheltenham runner who’d burnt off far too much energy on the first circuit and were running on the spot once they got to the hill.
That could happen again, clearly. Brian Lohan’s side wouldn’t take a lot of convincing that that universe has it in for them after yesterday. To lose Conor Cleary in the run-up, to have to throw in a lad making his first start of the championship to mark Aaron Gillane, to haul themselves into the endgame but be denied a cast-iron free to level it – all of it could make the natural exhaustion of defeat feel like a deadweight.
But if experience is the name we give to our mistakes, Clare at least have the roadmap splayed out in front of them and an intimate knowledge of the boreens and byways to avoid in the coming weeks. They can’t let another Munster final defeat – their fourth in seven seasons – define their year. They can’t arrive mentally drained into an All-Ireland semi-final and get blitzed again.
In their favour are a couple of small but significant differences. First off, they are likely to face Dublin in the quarter-final, rather than Wexford as they did in 2022. Micheál Donoghue’s side are by no means All-Ireland contenders but Clare haven’t played them in the championship since 2012. By contrast, Clare’s win over Wexford 12 months ago was the fourth time in five years they’d knocked them out of the summer. Whatever the strength of Dublin’s challenge, it will at least be a fresh one.
But probably more to the point is that the defeat to Limerick yesterday was of a completely different order to the one last year. Clare emptied themselves in pushing Kiely’s side to extra-time 12 months ago. They had one of those days where they gave it their absolute best shot and it drew an extraordinary response out of the champions to beat them. They don’t need to pick through the tape this time around to know this wasn’t that.
Clare should have had a free to draw the game. But the game shouldn’t have come down to that small a margin. Lohan pointed out afterwards that the respective stats on both sides were more or less even, with the exception of shooting efficiency. They had 11 more shots than Limerick but they scored with only 48 per cent of them. Up that to 50 per cent and it’s extra-time, free or no free. Up it to 52 and they’re Munster champions.
The net point is that Clare must know they are in a better place now than they were this time last year. Or they must convince themselves of that, at any rate. If they can do so, Limerick won’t want to see them again.
