Limerick have made a habit of turning whodunits into no-further-questions-m’luds. An All-Ireland hurling final that looked to be nicely poised early in the second half turned into a rout long before the end and sent John Kiely’s team back down the road as only the third team in history to win four of these in a row.
Though they have eaten the sport whole in the past half-decade, this must go down as the most satisfying feed of them all. Struggling for rhythm in the first half, they made it look like they were playing downhill after the break to ultimately run out winners by 0-30 to 2-15.
Hurling swaddles its history, tending to it through the generations to keep it living and breathing. What Limerick have done here will outlast them, as surely as it did the Cork team of the 1940s and the Kilkenny side of the 2000s. Kiely, a man of supreme non-faff, doesn’t tend to have much time for that kind of chat. Onwards, always onwards.
“We really do put a lot of effort into trying to live in the here and now,” Kiely said afterwards. “If you don’t in sport you’ll take your eye off the ball. So we hadn’t really had any engagement in reflection. We’ve had too much on our plate, quite frankly, all along, to deal with.
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“Take last Saturday for example, we had two cruciate knee ligament injuries. And your captain is definitely ruled out, on top of what you had already. You don’t get ahead of yourself in those circumstances, you just try to drive forward.
“You try to depend on your values that you have as a group, your work ethic, your honesty, your trust, that togetherness that is there as a group. Those are the things you go to. You don’t go to looking at the record that is gone ahead of you. Or what you’ve achieved or what anyone else has. You just concentrate on that, rely on that, as a foundation that you can go at this thing.”
In Kilkenny, another year passes without an All-Ireland. That’s eight now, which qualifies as a drought down by the Nore. A county that for so long had the hurling championship as its own personal plaything has been reduced to seeing how the other half live.
This is how it felt for everyone else when Henry Shefflin and the boys were in their pomp. The wheel always turns. For now the game belongs to Cian Lynch and his merry men.
And to think there was once a famous book on Limerick hurling called Unlimited Heartbreak. Greatness writes its own story.
