Waterford-Galway July 28 2009

IMMORTALITY comes with a reddish crew cut.

Waterford beat Galway yesterday by the width of a singlet, with John Mullane’s late, late point putting a spear in maroon hearts, as their manager said afterwards. Mullane’s game mirrored his team’s experience overall — a long slog through a scratchy 70 minutes before finding glory in time added on. Galway, battle-hardened after two good wins over Clare and Cork, were purposeful and precise all through, but when the hero of a thousand battles, Dan Shanahan, was thrown into the mix by Déise boss Davy Fitzgerald, it introduced the right note of chaos. Shanahan won a free and skimmed the woodwork before creating the game-breaking goal for Shane Walsh with four minutes left, and Galway wavered. Stripped of a four-point lead, the men from the west crumbled under Waterford’s waves of attack, and when Mullane steamed into space and peeled over the winning point, the Hollywood script was complete: roll credits and curtain. Galway will be heartbroken about this defeat for some time. For the neutral observer there was more evidence of the compression of play in hurling — frequently Galway and Waterford had two players in their full-forward lines, making the area between the two 45-metre lines as crowded as the opening of a new Ikea, but Galway often found Cyril Donnellan free on the opposing 65 with clever cross-field passes, and he kept the Waterford rearguard under pressure. At the back, Galway were cruising, with John Lee able to bat the ball down to Ger Farragher in a routine straight from the training ground, while Ollie Canning swept up imperiously. Waterford had to rely on Eoin Kelly’s remorseless accuracy from frees to keep a toehold in the game, while Michael Brick Walsh and Stephen Molumphy were ferocious in their resistance. Galway were four points up with the clock winding down and looked ready to streak away. Waterford’s Eoin Kelly begged to differ. “No, there was a strong breeze there and we knew we’d finish strongly,” said Kelly. “Even in the Munster final we could have caught Tipperary if we’d taken our chances. We always knew we had a chance of catching Galway, we’ve been finishing games wicked strong. “We’d given ourselves too much to do point-wise. Dan came on and made a goal, and nearly got one himself. I’m delighted for him, he’s after coming in for a lot of criticism.” Galway boss John McIntyre conceded that the Waterford goal was the turning point. “We had an attack that broke down, maybe the wrong option was taken, and Waterford worked the ball down the field for a goal. “I knew straightaway it would be a dogfight from there to the finish and it was a case of us holding on. Hopefully.” Galway couldn’t hold the line, however, and Waterford now face Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final. The Cats have not played — we hesitate, naturally, to use the actual term ‘idle’ — since July 5. For another team that lack of competitive action might be a disadvantage. For another team, that is. Yet Waterford will go into the game as rank outsiders, and they’ll pack away a score to settle after last year’s All-Ireland final annihilation into their gearbags for the trip to Croke Park. Good ammunition to have. Their manager was enjoying the moment yesterday, though. “Days like this makes it all worthwhile,” said Davy Fitzgerald. “I love being involved in this thing, I really, really love being involved. I love being involved with a bunch that will give you everything they can. “We were wrote off big-time during the week and this is absolutely fantastic for the boys but it’s a quarter-final and we’ll remember that tomorrow morning.” In the opening game, Limerick did well to recover from an opening few minutes in which Dublin scored early and often, like a voter scoring the ballot in a 60s by-election. The men in sky blue have been a highlight of the season, with their entertaining brand of muscular support play, but one of the imperishable principles of hurling defence left them down yesterday. The importance of a full-back with a zero tolerance appetite for nonsense around the square was underlined as Limerick goaled through the direct approach — Paudie McNamara — before adding a penalty won the same way. Brian Murray’s emphatic finish tied the scores at half-time and Dublin’s good work against the breeze was instantly undone. The teams were locked in a death embrace until the last 10 minutes, when Gavin O’Mahony’s sideline cut soared over the bar to set Limerick free, and they kicked on from there. Anthony Daly won’t want praise for this season’s progress, but Dublin have ended the year in credit. This season will stand to them, though it may be Wednesday or Thursday before they have a mind to see it like that. Genetically speaking Limerick have no problem facing Tipperary, and the Premier County will see uncomfortable similarities between last year’s semi-final and this season’s – they face familiar opponents who are expected to act as sacrificial lambs and a second-half fade-out would be fatal. By the same token, if Limerick start as slowly as they did yesterday — and against Laois — it could be a long afternoon for them. But in either case we’d settle for an ending half as enjoyable as yesterday’s.

Paul Flynn interview July 10 2009

PAUL FLYNN may not be playing for Waterford any more, but that doesn’t mean his radar is missing any star players. You only have to ask. “Who do you have your eye on”?

“Well . . . Noel McGrath from Tipperary,” says Flynn. “Our Eoin Kelly, John Mullane; Richie Power. Joe Canning.”

No defenders? A longish pause. “Eoin Murphy,” he says eventually. “Mark Foley. Lads I’d have played against. But mostly forwards, yeah.”

Flynn put down 17 seasons with the Déise. Good days, bad days, happy and sad. But now it’s gone and he’s not looking back.

“The lads who’d know me well would know when I played hurling I played hurling, and that’s it. I packed in last year
after 17 years, and I enjoyed most of it and I’ll move on now.

“I don’t want to go back to saying I wasn’t fanatical about it, but I wasn’t. Maybe that helps. It was something I was able to do, I can’t do it any more, so you move on.”

He moved on to sitting in Thurles for the first Waterford-Limerick game. Then he decided to move on again.

“What goes on in the stand would really wake you up to what lads are being called. Some of the things being said about Waterford lads – great Waterford players – by Waterford people would open your eyes. I won’t say it upset me but for the
second game I couldn’t go to the stands and listen to that. If I went again I’d be bringing a
radio. It’s incredible.”

There have always been hurlers on the ditch, but Flynn doesn’t enjoy other, more recent developments.

“You can’t really compare nowadays to 1992 and those early years because with no backdoor we were preparing for one game, which we often lost. But the point of driving to Dungarvan to have a session of walking in the water . . . you’re gone at 5, on Clonea strand at 6, after grub you’re maybe home at 9, or half past. Just to recover.

“Or being at the beach for 7 am the morning after playing a game. I never saw the sense to that and there’s no secret that I wouldn’t be a fan of it.”

FLYNN traces the new regimes to Kilkenny’s dominance and managers wishing to emulate that.

“There’s no doubt a lot of it is down to the lack of managers wanting to be different or innovative. A lot of is counter-productive, I think; if a fella is tired after a game what’s the point in getting him out of bed at half-six the following morning?

“Justin (McCarthy) would have had the idea, and I wouldn’t have been far off it myself, that hurling is hurling and athletics is athletics. The more hurling you do the better and the whole canoeing, or mountain-climbing, or walking around blindfolded . . . some fellas might get something out of it. Not me. But, definitely, if it got out that Kilkenny were all playing with 32-inch hurleys, then every team would be using them then.”

Some of the innovations he approved of — “the Nutron diet wasn’t bad; one night at training I lapped a few fellas, so it had to be good,” – while others aren’t so obvious.

“I’d say the major difference that people don’t realise is that with the previous (Waterford) management there were no great instructions, it was a case of going out and playing. Okay, defenders would be told to be in front, to pick out their men, to handpass to a better man for a clearance. But there were no great patterns or set plays further up the field. Waterford seem to be playing a more controlled game now, whereas I’d prefer to go out and play instinctively.

“It’s possible with set patterns that fellas get locked in, and the fear factor can come in – lads can get fearful over losing the ball. But the win over Limerick will definitely have brought lads on, in fairness.”

Regarding Sunday, he’s realistic. “I wouldn’t say I’m worried, but I’d have concerns — Limerick were so bad in the first game, they were almost like a club team for the first 20 minutes. I’d say they couldn’t believe they were still in it in the second half.

“The weather was shocking, fair enough, but take John (Mullane) out of it . . . Waterford are playing the ball to him, but you can’t rely on one player chipping in with all the scores.

“From Waterford’s point of view – will Stephen (Molumphy) and Tony (Browne) be right? They’re big worries.

“As against that, Tipp’s big players last year have been doing well for 20 -minute stretches, but they’ve also been disappearing for long stretches. If Waterford can stay steady then they’ve a chance. And Waterford have a good record in recent years against Tipp.”

THAT’S been with Ken McGrath, of course – Flynn is frank about the loss of the Mount Sion man: “The difference in having the Ken of last year and previous years and no Ken at all is . . . it’s not immeasurable, but it nearly is.”

There have been other spin-offs, however. Surely the Waterford minors of today are kids nourished on the Déise’s championship voyages since 1998? “I’d say so. I grew up watching John Fenton, Jimmy Barry-Murphy, Tom Cashman, all these lads, but that time the All-Ireland semi-final would be the first games on telly, and it would have been Cork, Galway, Tipp.

“So these lads are ahead in that sense. They’re competing in Thurles – and hopefully Croke Park – at an earlier age. In 1998 for the All-Ireland semi-final the bus went to the wrong door in Croke Park; we didn’t know any different. You can see that Waterford are more competitive in the Harty and in other Munster colleges competitions, so hopefully that’s a start.

“Tipp have a good minor team, but it’s still progress. You have to make progress at minor, at U21 – not necessarily winning, but competing. So I’d say yeah, some of those lads are lads who wanted to be Ken (McGrath) or Dan (Shanahan) when they were younger.”

Not to mention the lads who wanted to be Paul Flynn. That vacancy exists now in Waterford, but it’ll be a tall order for the youngsters trying to fill it.

Joe Canning – 2008 Sports Highlight

The day the boy warrior
Canning’s star sang

REMEMBER your Yeats.

It wasn’t a great hurling year by any means. It won’t linger the way 2007 does.

Kilkenny were deserved All-Ireland champions, but their obliteration of Waterford in the final had a sheen of efficiency and ruthlessness that you could admire but hardly love.

It didn’t have, for instance, the
poetry of a boy warrior in Thurles, performing heroics as the summer sun began to set.

The great WB slips a passing reference to “golden-thighed Pythagoras” into Among School Children, a
glittering phrase that stays bright for you long after the fog of your
schooldays disperses. It suggests power, skill and riches in one quick image, and if the by-heart stanzas of 20 years ago weren’t what we had in mind on that late July evening in Thurles,
immortal comparison soon was.

It was the game in which Joe
Canning announced his arrival, and golden didn’t seem treasured enough a comparison for him.

Beforehand there were questions. Canning impressed in Galway’s run to the league final. Having blithely cut sidelines over the bar in Croke Park as a minor, he proved against Cork in a league clash in Limerick that pitch
dimensions are the same for minor and senior.

The flight path of one sideline cut, taken from the shadow of the covered stand in the second half, was extraordinary: it wandered off-course initially before settling on a pitiless trajectory directly over the Cork crossbar.

It also reconfigured the rules,
signalling to every other county that a sideline in their own half against
Galway was a likely score conceded.

There had been a goal against
Tipperary in the league final — with his hurley fully extended, Canning beat Brendan Cummins while relying totally on his wrists. Lucky enough, Canning said afterwards. Luck is right.

But Galway manager Ger Loughnane had advised the Portumna teenager to mimic his clubmate Damien Hayes’ industry, and pace has always been present on the Canning charge sheet. Some suggested the trench warfare of Fitzgibbon Cup campaigns doesn’t compare to the
cavalry charges of high summer, and by the time July rolled around Galway had played Laois and Antrim before taking the field against Cork.

In Thurles. Where else can these kinds of questions be asked? Where else can they be answered?

Canning wrote the first chapter of his senior intercounty career in
lightning that night with a tally of 2-12.

His first goal was a triumph of strength, holding off an uncharitable Diarmuid O’Sullivan as he bore down on goal, and of deftness, improvising an emphatic forehand smash to the net.

Just before the break Canning helped to free Alan Kerins near the Cork goal, and when Donal Óg Cusack floored Kerins, the keeper was off for a second yellow card.

Canning took the resultant penalty. Ring always said he aimed at the funkiest player on the line, but
Canning picked the coldest: substitute keeper Martin Coleman was just on the field and the Galwayman stitched the ball past him. Galway, or Joe
Canning, 2-5, Cork 0-9.

After half-time Canning added three of the first points of the second half and Galway were four up.

The pace question didn’t arise. The Galwayman worked at his own speed, creating a force field any time the ball came near him to operate on his own clock: Canning time. He gathered the ball and tilted to lean away from his marker, flexing those golden wrists to put the ball exactly where he wanted.

Even the fact that it was a summer evening added to the occasion. Rather than the harsh spotlight of an afternoon throw-in, there was a memorable tint to proceedings, players bright on one side, facing the sun, and long shadows stretching away on the other.

It wasn’t just about Canning that evening, after all. One observer thought the Cork display was one of the greatest displays he’d ever seen,
isolating a second-half incident when ball came down into Cork’s right corner — right out of the sun — and fell between Cork’s Shane O’Neill and Galway’s Ger Farragher.

Farragher lost the ball in the sun but O’Neill didn’t.

“He caught it and he was snorting like a bull as he was driving forward,” said the observer, one Ger Loughnane.

Ben O’Connor and Joe Deane drove Cork to an improbable lead, but as the effort told, Canning joined brawn to accuracy. He hit three points into the Town End as time ticked away, but Cork survived. Deane won a late, late free out on the left wing and the game was up.

After the final whistle that evening in Thurles, delirious Cork supporters
invaded the field. They had massed on the sidelines and surged on to celebrate victory rather than, as it looked at half-time, line up for a wake. The players in red struggled into the dressing-room area one at a time, and each shook a fist at the crowds hanging over the entrance to the Semple Stadium tunnel, each of them lauded in turn.

For much of that time Canning was out on the field, signing autographs, not all of them for kids in maroon. Then he came back to the stadium tunnel, and he passed us, sweat still rolling down his face. An enterprising photographer took a picture of him trudging to the Galway dressing-room.

The shoulders are slumped and the head is down, while Thor’s hammer drags along the ground. The great melody is still.

But while he was on the field … it was what a star sang, Yeats might have said. What a careless muse heard.

The Men in the Iron Masks

The men in the iron masks

IS THERE room in hurling for two princes? Alexandre Dumas would probably have disagreed, consigning either Joe Canning of Galway or Cork’s Paudie O’Sullivan to life in an iron mask, but yesterday the Gaelic Grounds proved big enough for both of them.

Canning’s incredible underage and club career — five All-Ireland medals at the age of 19 — mean his was the most keenly-awaited senior debut in living memory. He didn’t disappoint, either. The big Portumna lad scored four points but he had a hand in both Galway goals and could claim at least two assists no matter how you judge your player stats.

The coming of Paudie O’Sullivan hasn’t been as heralded, but his early departure from the Cork panel last season with a cruciate ligament injury was described by a selector, aptly enough, as crucifying — for his own sake and for Cork’s chances in 2007.

Canning began on Shane O’Neill and O’Sullivan on Conor Dervan, the Cork man playing as an orthodox corner-forward while Canning seemed to have licence to roam. Neither exploded into the game: O’Sullivan won a ball and burrowed through for a point on six minutes, at which stage Canning had yet to enjoy clean possession.

O’Sullivan involved Ben O’Connor later for a free which the Newtownshandrum man pointed, but Canning answered with a similar flick to Niall Healy for a point and then he came into his kingdom.

He pointed himself, set up Ger Farragher for a point, and on 25 minutes he won the ball near goal and had the vision to pick out Iarla Tannian lurking behind the Cork defence: goal. Early on the sizeable Galway contingent had been urging the new man on almost in an undertone, but his fine assist persuaded them to cheer con brio.

Five minutes after that Canning won a clever free 21m from goal; when it was moved into the centre he and Farragher had a discussion as to who’d take it. Farragher did, and goaled.

Canning’s first half report card read as follows, therefore: involvement in two goals, assists for two points, and two points scored himself.

A gusting wind aided Cork after the break, and O’Sullivan benefited, scoring two more points and winning a couple of frees, including one of the 20m efforts which Cork tried to goal from. He was at full-forward then, with Canning at centre-forward, and those may be their championship berths.

Canning wasn’t as busy as in the first half, but he managed a fine point and gave the killer pass for Galway’s insurance point. In general terms it’s worth pointing out that Galway were the better team for longer periods yesterday, which helped the Portumna club man.

Cork will be happy with the return they got from O’Sullivan. Four points from play and a nose for the direct path to goal will leave manager Gerald McCarthy happy enough. It may be a result of O’Sullivan’s underage apprenticeship as a rampaging half-back, but he was a good first line of defence for Cork, winning one of the 21m frees from which Cork tried for a goal.

Canning, however, looks to have bypassed any apprenticeship to announce himself as a full-formed menace to defensive society. His manager certainly thought so.

“Beforehand the game Joe was the same as if he was playing a challenge for Portumna,” said Ger Loughnane. “The first few balls didn’t go for him, next thing he lays it off for a goal.

“People look at what Joe scored, and they might say ‘he got 2-14 from frees, he was brilliant’ — but it’s what he does off the ball, bringing them into the play with his vision, those are characteristics that people underestimate.”

True enough. But if you want to talk scores… when Canning had an energetic tussle on the sideline with two Cork defenders in the second half – ‘exchanging pleasantries’ is the usual term — he needed attention for his right hand. There was a fine sense of occasion after he recovered and asked for the ball to take the sideline cut.

That he put the ball well over the bar from over 50m never seemed to be in doubt, and when the umpire dived for the flag it set off the roar of the day from the followers in maroon.

Alexandre Dumas never heard of hurling, but he’d surely have applauded young Canning’s flair for the dramatic gesture.