After a few dull years it’s about time All-Ireland hurling semi-final weekend thrilled us again

On All-Ireland hurling semi-final weekends we have taught ourselves to tiptoe. Time was there’d be no harm in galumphing your way into the penultimate weekend of the hurling year, filling the air with all manner of ribald declarations about the great old game. Let the poets write, boys. Nothing like it.

Go back to the latter half of the 2010s and this was nailed-on to be one of the best weekends of the sporting year. Hurling was finally wriggling free of the black and amber stranglehold of the previous decade and everyone who arrived at the last four came to Croke Park with a why-not-us song in their heart. All leave was cancelled for area cardiologists.

Consider, for a moment, the All-Ireland semi-finals between 2015 and 2019. Including draws and replays, we saw 12 matches in total. Nine of them were decided by two points or less. A tenth – Limerick v Cork in 2018 – ended up with a four-point margin in Limerick’s favour but it took extra-time to get there.

Of the dozen encounters only two ended with more than five between the sides. Every game was like a 23rd count on election night. Supporters wild-eyed, tallymen sweatpatched. Oblivion on tap.

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It’s not like that now. Hasn’t been for a while. The All-Ireland semi-finals of this decade have become grittier, more gruelling affairs. There’s still drama, the stakes are still deathly high. But these games haven’t been throwing up the crowd-pleasing blockbusters they used to. Less Tarantino, more David Simon maybe.

Reasons? Well, for one the game has a dominant team now where it didn’t have then. Limerick last got caught in an All-Ireland semi-final in 2019; since then they’ve boxed off this weekend by 11 points over Waterford in 2021 and a couple of never-nearer three-pointers over Galway the other two years.

There have been more double-figure wins at this stage in the past two seasons than there were in the previous six put together. Kilkenny walloped Clare last year, a result nobody saw coming but everyone understood in retrospect. Clare had left so much of themselves in bringing Limerick to a dark place in the Munster final that they nobbled the rest of their season. Running with the bulls is a thrill but the cuts and gashes tend to take a while to clear up afterwards.

The game has got a bit knottier of itself too. For the past few seasons we’ve had one of those intermittent spells where hurling has run low on goals. Limerick have scored one goal in the past three All-Ireland semi-finals combined without ever really looking in danger of it costing them. Those semi-finals at the end of the 2010s averaged out at three goals a game. For the semi-finals since 2020 that average is down to 1.66.

None of this is to dismiss what we are about to receive. We know hurling bends towards the light. More than that we know that the distance between Limerick and the peloton isn’t nearly what it was. We know that Clare can’t possibly turn up as washed out as they were last year, that Galway have a bank of credible form to draw from, that Kilkenny are getting a kick from their first post-Cody summer. It won’t take much for these games to find themselves ablaze.

The best quote of the year from any manager anywhere came back in April. We were down on the pitch in the Gaelic Grounds and Brian Lohan had just seen his side end Limerick’s four-year unbeaten championship run. He had changed goalkeepers since the previous week, replacing Eamonn Foudy with Eibhear Quilligan and when we asked him what he’d said to Foudy by way of softening the blow, he went off on a glorious tangent on the nature of intercounty hurling.

“Ah, I didn’t really say that much to Eamonn,” the Clare manager said. “He’s a worker and he does his job and works really hard. He comes in an hour before the start time and he’s just going to keep working. It’s a hard place to be, intercounty hurling is tough. It’s a tough, ignorant, ruthless, brutal game and he’s well able for that. Things went against him, but it doesn’t define him.”

Tough. Ignorant. Ruthless. Brutal. Every player who takes the pitch in Croke Park this weekend knows what Lohan was talking about. His own team haven’t been back in a final since they won it all in 2013. Galway went from being in three finals in four years to not being in any since 2018. Kilkenny are going through the county’s longest spell without an All-Ireland in over 30 years.

Even Limerick, who have built an empire on being tougher, more ignorant, more ruthless and more brutal than all the others, arrive at this point in the season a weakened thing. No Seán Finn. No Declan Hannon. A team that John Kiely has had to disrupt more than he would have wished to – not so much a line-up as an anagram. If they manage to pull it off over the coming fortnight it will unquestionably be their greatest triumph.

Three games left, then, to explain the hurling year. The final will take care of itself, as it always does. A planet with its own atmosphere, its own oceans and storms. With so few hurling weekends in the calendar it would be a welcome treat if the semi-finals got their groove back over the coming days.

The least we can say is that we’re due.