The Sliotar End

Now there are four. The All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals, it must be said, had something of the aura of pigs scrapping it out for a place in the abattoir. Galway and Limerick fans will undoubtedly feel a little deflated at their Championship downfall, but they won’t have had to search too hard for the silver lining: defeat spares them the prospect of a spot in the semis, a fate which now awaits Waterford and Dublin, neither of whom will be under any illusions about the monumentally savage difficulty of the task which awaits them.

The Dubs, at least, have nothing to lose, and can look upon the imminent Tipperary ordeal as a well-earned adventure. Reaching this stage for the first time in 50 years has to count as a triumph in itself, and there are surely even brighter days to come (All-Ireland glory in 2015, perhaps?)
The knees began to knock conspicuously during the second half against Limerick, occasionally summoning up dark echoes of the teams’ meeting at the same stage two years ago, where the Dubs nursed a fragile lead for the vast majority of the match, holding onto it as if it was a live electric cable, and eventually succumbing to nerves, inexperience and a lack of self-belief in the closing stages.

For a while, the weekend’s quarter-final threatened to follow a similar script. A quite stunning first-half hat-trick from Ryan O’Dwyer put the Dubs nine points clear after twenty-odd minutes and really ought to have settled the issue definitively, but (as with the county’s footballers) there’s always the feeling that no lead is quite large enough to be regarded as safe, and by the time Limerick clawed the deficit back to two early in the second half, one feared the worst. Against the backdrop of five decades’ under-achievement, for Dublin to hold their nerve and seal the deal was a considerable accomplishment, though they were aided immeasurably by some horribly wayward Limerick shooting, and there was little or nothing in the overall performance to suggest that Tipp will suffer undue sleep-loss between now and semi-final day.

The champions’ Achilles heel is not difficult to locate: as monstrously powerful a force as Tipp are, they look less than watertight in defence, and have already leaked quite a few goals in this year’s Championship, a failing rendered irrelevant by the fact that they are banging them in at a blood-curdling rate at the other end. Perhaps complacency may be a slight issue, but you wouldn’t bet on it.

It is verging on impossible to envisage any scenario that involves Dublin coming out on top, though if they keep O’Dwyer at full-forward (why was he moved after rattling in three goals in the first half?) and Tipp sleepwalk through the opening stages the way they did against Cork and Clare, it may be a less straightforward affair then anticipated. A shellacking of grisly proportions would possibly be a setback to the Dubs’ long-term development, but any sort of semi-respectable outcome would qualify as a fine end to a fine season, and victory would propel us to the promised land. There is nothing to lose and a whole world to be conquered.
For Waterford, the picture is a little more complex, and the sense of deja-vu must be a lot more pronounced. They have been here before, again and again, and repeatedly been found wanting. A marvellously stylish and entertaining sight throughout the Noughties, their attacking fluency rendered them by far the most watchable and aesthetically appealing team in the country.

Yet they never captured the ultimate prize, largely thanks to a terminally unconvincing defence and a tendency to leak cripplingly huge scores in key games: 5-11 against Limerick in the 2007 semi, 3-30 against Kilkenny in the 2008 final, 4-14 against Tipp and 2-23 against Kilkenny in ‘09, 3-19 against Tipp in last year’s semi, 7-19 against Tipp in the recent Munster final — it’s a pretty damning charge sheet, and there’s absolutely zero evidence that they have the personnel or the know-how to stop the bleeding this time around against a Kilkenny side which will be ravenous and, as ever, utterly ruthless.

With Dan Shanahan retired and John Mullane not getting any younger, the Waterford attack no longer carries anything like the menace it once did, and where you once would have always fancied them to prevail in any high-scoring shootout, there’s now an inescapable sense that their best days are behind them. Until this year, I was of the opinion that goalkeeper Clinton Hennessy was a huge part of the problem, but he’s been perfectly adequate in 2011 and often downright inspired.
The team must be commended for putting the Tipp trauma behind them and slaughtering an increasingly schizoid Galway side which had started the match as unbackable 2/7 favourites, but the Westerners’ display was so feeble and spiritless that it’s questionable whether beating them on one of their all-too-frequent off-days was anything to sing and dance about.

Waterford have become almost a constant in the All-Ireland semi-finals over the last few years, but they have suffered far too many dispiriting wipeouts in that time to be fancied with any confidence at all against Kilkenny, rumours of whose demise have surely been exaggerated.
Indeed, it must be acknowledged that Kilkenny and Tipp now tower over the rest of the hurling landscape to a degree which is unprecedented in recent memory, and their almost inevitable collision in the Final will, not without reason, be the most eagerly-anticipated clash in living memory, a collision of two irresistible forces, a shootout for the ages.