How The Cats Were Skinned

To anyone who was insane enough to heed my advice and lump their hard-earned on Kilkenny the other day, I must borrow a phrase from Gusty Spence and offer, in all sincerity, abject and true remorse. No words of mine can ever compensate for the intolerable suffering you must have undergone during the Final.

Aside from dropping a few quid, I’ve got to say I enjoyed the match massively, and even managed to raise a smile at the outcome, having long since begun to mentally dismiss as rather remote the possibility that we would ever see anyone other than Kilkenny win the All-Ireland for the next two or three centuries.
The ‘Drive For Five’ genuinely seemed to capture the national imagination (perhaps due to its rarity value) but it’s doubtful whether a Drive For Six, or Ten or Fifteen or Twenty, would have been watched by the wider public with quite the same enthusiasm. So, we’ve finally got a championship again which doesn’t have one team’s name written all over it from the outset, which has to be a good thing.
While it’s hardly implausible that the wounded Cats will rebound with a vengeance and proceed to monopolise the championship for the next thousand years, the respective age profile of both teams suggests that we may well be on the cusp of a new dynasty, with Tipp supplanting their old enemy and lording it for many years to come.
In all likelihood, we can look forward to an epic rivalry for the next few seasons, with both counties towering above the rest from a great height: a bit like Cork and Kilkenny in the mid-Noughties, but with the stranglehold of the new duopoly considerably more pronounced.
The bookies, having been comprehensively wrong-footed on this one (though not by me) still marginally incline towards the Cats for next season. Perennial under-achievers Galway are a pretty distant third in the reckoning at 8/1, and anyone who’s inclined to look outside the top three can be accomodated at a minimum of 20/1. In other words, the competitive balance is still completely lopsided and the summer’s skirmishes may be a near-formality. But at least we’re in for a cracking battle between the top two. Habitual observers of the Scottish Premier League will recognise the feeling.
As for the upcoming All Ireland football final, the Foul Play vote goes to Cork, though not without reservations. They’ve been knocking on the door for two or three years now, and though they haven’t entirely eradicated their tendency to faff around too much in possession without going for the jugular (‘killer instinct’ I think is the technical term we’re looking for here), they definitely seem to have the upper hand in the strength and stamina stakes.
Down’s run to the Final has been delightful, but you still sense that they’re not exactly head and shoulders above at least half-a-dozen of the counties who didn’t get this far. Expect a reasonably close encounter, with the Rebels doing just about enough.
If I may return to the wonderful world of foreign games — Step One in Ireland’s conquest of Europe has been successfully negotiated, with the Armenian banana-skin causing a momentary wobble rather than a crashing tumble. I stated last fortnight that I’d bite your big toe off for an ugly 1-0 win, so now that it’s duly been delivered, I’m not inclined to agonise about the manner of it or delve too deeply into our shortcomings.
It was tense for long stretches, but it’s hardly unreasonable to speculate that the infernal 30-plus heat rendered the task trickier than it might otherwise have been. There were elements of the performance that rang a few alarm bells: Paul Green’s competitive international baptism was not an auspicious one, 33-year-old Kevin Kilbane is not exactly a long-term solution at left-back, and Robbie Keane will have to be a lot sharper than this when the sinister Slovaks and Russians stroll into town.
Having worked like dogs to establish a priceless 1-0 lead with fifteen minutes left, the most disturbing omen for the battles to come was the way we responded to going ahead: retreating back into our shells, surrendering possession, ceding the initiative, and generally overdoing the whole what-we-have-we-hold routine. This has backfired on Ireland so often down the years (not least during the last campaign) that you wonder why we persist: the generalisation can safely be made that players from these islands are simply not cut out to execute this approach properly, and the sooner Trap realises this, the better.
Of course, the chances of Il Maestro discarding his own gospel at the age of 71 are non-existent, and it would be daft to overlook the visible benefits he’s brought to the team in terms of unity, spirit, cohesion, shape and purpose.
Still, I wince when I see us affording the likes of Armenia such exaggerated respect. Cautious thou-shalt-not-pass conservatism works wonders if you’re early-90s AC Milan and have a Maldini, Baresi, Costacurta and Tassotti to prosecute the deal and actually hold onto the ball; it’s not quite as bulletproof when you’re working with a Kilbane-Dunne-St Ledger-O’Shea axis, steeped as they all are in the frenzied 100mph helter-skelter cauldron of English domestic football. We got away with it, but it’s an approach that seems to increase rather than diminish the risk of giving goals away.
By the time you read this, I assume Andorra will have been put to fire and the sword, though Trap’s pre-match comments would seem to indicate that anyone anticipating a goal rush is barking up the wrong tree, and a prosaic 3-0 stroll will have been regarded as a fine day at the office. I would prefer 7-0 — even five or six doesn’t seem a great deal to ask against a team ranked 201st among world football’s 207 nations — but, taking the long-term view as we must, all we really wanted from September was six points, and the Good Lord has provided them. At least, I assume he has.
If, by the time you read this, we have dropped points against Andorra, I officially announce my retirement from writing about, talking about, thinking about or watching football for the rest of my life.