Kyle Hayes and Limerick intent on prolonging their golden era

It was the moment when last summer’s All-Ireland hurling championship turned combustible.

A broiling day in Cork and Kyle Hayes comes loping onto Cian Lynch's floated invitation of a handpass and takes off. He's just inside his own 65 and already accelerating. By evening's fall, what happened over the following seconds would be a cause of celebration.

The parameters of the old game nudged forward a few degrees. Archives were ransacked for comparison; few immediate pairings were found.

Former Kilkenny star Eddie Brennan, with both goalpoacher's heart and hurling coach's head, wondered about the chasm in Tipp's defence before turning to the score itself.

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“What an amazing finish even because he had the hurl turned the other way with the heel of the hurl up the sky when normally you have your toe up when you are striking the ball like that. But he was coming at such pace all he was really going to do was to pass that ball into the net. I wouldn’t have liked to have been chasing him. He’s a powerhouse.”

The speed, the ease with which Hayes hopped the ball at full tilt, the hard step off his left foot which split and stranded two arriving Tipp players. And the coolness. The goal would become the symbol of Limerick’s imperious second-half comeback but that is misleading. They’d already made mincemeat of Tipp’s ten-point lead and the momentum switch was so thorough and authoritative that they’d acquired the burnished look of invincibility when they still trailed by four.

The Hayes goal, in the 54th minute, put them five up and sent a chill through the hurling hemisphere on one of the hottest days of the year. Afterwards, John Kiely set the score against the context of what had been a deeply sad week for Hayes and his local community.

Hayes represents the embodiment of Limerick's rapid transformation from the frustrated romantics of the Munster division to the epicentre of hurling power

"Cracking goal. He has had a really tough week, Darren O'Connell as well. Their good friend Darragh Whelan passed away tragically last weekend. It's an awful blow to those young lads. Hats off to Kyle. It was difficult for him to do what he did today. At times he found it hard outside there on the pitch. Like everything Kyle does he gives it all. There is no reverse. There is only going forward with Hayes and that is the bottom line. And I hope that is the way he will continue to be. And he can dedicate that performance to his great friend."

By that evening, even the most grounded hurling analysts, several of whom had starred on Kilkenny’s unbeatable teams, placed Limerick’s comeback among the best displays they had seen. And Kyle Hayes’s goal became the rarest of things in an era when everything seems instant and erasable; unforgettable.

“Last year he got the ball against Cork in his own half and there was 40 yards in front of him and there was a buzz of expectation,” says Éanna McGarrigle, who has coached Hayes at academy level and has watched him progress through the Kildimo-Pallaskenry underage ranks. For everyone in the club, Hayes’s progression from a big, amicable play-anything young fella to the man of the match performance in the 2018 All-Ireland final was a joy to behold.

Hayes represents the embodiment of Limerick's rapid transformation from the frustrated romantics of the Munster division to the epicentre of hurling power. McGarrigle started working with him in 2017. Hayes was 19 then and already the club's key player. But it was after Limerick's 2018 season that he noticed the big leap.

“That year, we started the club championship in April and finished it later in the year. When he came back to us having won an All-Ireland, he was just way more clinical in everything that he did. Before that, he was playing midfield /half-forward for us and scored 0-1. Now, he was unbelievable in those two matches and was the dominant player. But in his first games back he hit 0-3, 1-5, 1-3.

“He was suddenly racking up massive scores and that comes from coaching under the likes of Kinnerk and playing with phenomenal players. He was always great in the air and very strong for his age. Once he began the strength and conditioning, he has the frame to carry a lot of muscle. If there was one flaw in his game, his finishing was quite poor for a county player.

“That was the big transformation in his game. And more than anyone I have ever encountered Kyle has a drive for continuous improvement. He wants to get better. So that goal – and the one against Cork; the number of times you would see him at the end of training and get someone to stand in his way and go past them and strike low to the corner or bat the ball past the goalkeeper. He identified those flaws and worked to improve them. It reached the stage where we expected him to score a goal every time he got the ball.”

When he takes possession of the ball in full flight, the rangy stride combined with the balance and the sheer physical power make him hard to stop

Hayes’s conversion to Limerick’s half back line was facilitated by a high-octane work rate and the mobility to scrap for the ball in rucks as well as dominate in the air.

His acceleration from a standing start over five metres is formidable and when he takes possession of the ball in full flight, the rangy stride combined with the balance and the sheer physical power make him hard to stop.

“Kyle and Gearóid [Hegarty] look like big lumps,” says McGarrigle. “But both are ridiculously fast. Kyle in particular over five or ten metres is so sharp. And once he gets the speed up he is very difficult to stop. Very few have the size and pace and he has the hurling brain to go along with it.”

Last November, at a ceremony in the Strand Hotel, Limerick chairman John Cregan presented Hayes with 11 medals he had yet to receive, including his Celtic Crosses from the All-Ireland triumphs in 2020 and 2021, three Munster championship medals and league medals from 2019 and 2020. He described the haul as "unprecedented".

And it was that. Limerick are in a spell of success that would have looked like a mirage had it been viewed 15 years ago, when winning a hurling All-Ireland felt impossible.

Kiely has been steadfast in keeping his young squad grounded and is never keen to dwell for too long on what this period of brilliance means. Legacy is something for afterwards. Like most of the Limerick seniors, Hayes is more often seen than heard. In one of his very few interviews, when he picked up a player of the month award after that 2018 success, he returned to a fleeting uncertainty about which sport to pursue.

“I was in two minds. It was fairly tough because I really enjoyed soccer at the time. And hurling at the time, I wasn’t having a great impact. I was going better at the soccer. It was tough but I had to choose one because I was out every second night of the week.”

The ordinariness of their league campaign – just a single win – has emboldened other competitors

He also played rugby for Richmond RFC as a teenager and the sight of Hayes rampaging along the wing for the Limerick hurlers must have led to several informal enquiries among the custodians of Munster rugby. It’s not difficult to imagine the impact he would have had.

Fortunately for Limerick, he was among the generation of youngsters who benefitted from the comprehensive and strategic under-age structure that was initiated by the hurling community. His influence on young hurlers in the club has been immense.

“The fact that he was a stand-out player on a strong Limerick minor team was huge for us. And now that he is a national figure in a sporting sense has a big influence,” McGarrigle says.

“You see him around and he is so accessible to the kids locally. You would see him down at underage training. You are just trying to get numbers down to the pitch. When I was 8 or 9 we had to ring around to get a county player down.

“Now, if we have a medal presentation, we can call on Kyle and he will arrange for others to come along. He was involved in coaching the club minor team last year. He wasn’t the manager, as he had other commitments. But he was doing sessions and was at all of their matches. It is the first time we have competed at premier minor and we got to a semi-final. I have a hunch a lot of these senior Limerick players might end up as very good coaches because they have been exposed to very good coaching inside.”

How to perpetuate this golden period is the chief task for Limerick now. The ordinariness of their league campaign – just a single win – has emboldened other competitors. Their Easter Sunday championship opener against a Cork team smarting from league final hurt will tell us more. Hayes is just 24 and stands prominently amongst a group chasing history. They’ve been riveting and carefree in their stunning rise. A defining season beckons.