A PHRASE YOU hear a bit around the Cork team this past while is ‘dampening down the hype’.
The second-half fadeout in the league final. The loss of focus and discipline that led to Clare’s comeback. The sloppiness against Tipperary’s 14 men for much of the second half. Dampening down the hype! Keep that expectation from a success-hungry public in check.
I’m not sure about all this. If Cork are going to win this All-Ireland then at some stage soon they’re going to have to take that hype and fire a large can of petrol over it.
That’s what a win would do in Limerick on Sunday. It’s a game that’s too close to call. I’d back Limerick for the most simple reason that they’re playing better and look to be improving.
The performance against Waterford was assured and quietly devastating. They made a fine team look rushed and blunt, while not engaging their own higher gears. To keep this spluttery combustion engine imagery going, Cork are the fastest racing car but Limerick perhaps have the superior average speed.
Until Cork find a way to keep their levels more consistent, or at least limit the amount of minutes they drift out of games, then it’s hard to see them winning the All-Ireland we’re told by many an astute judge ‘they won’t leave behind this time’.
So I think Limerick will win on Sunday, though I’d be nowhere near putting much cash behind that conviction.
There is one hurling bet I’ll be making this summer, though. Cian Lynch is available at 11/1 to win the hurler of the year award.
This, to me, is almost as good as an 11/1 bet on Limerick winning the All-Ireland. Yes, I know Aaron Gillane or Gearoid Heagerty or Shane O’Brien could catch fire. And I know Cork contained Lynch fairly well last year. And I realise his injury problems since 2022, ankle and in particular hamstring, make it tougher for him to hit those 2018 to 2021 standards where he was twice the hurler of the year.
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But I’m convinced if Limerick make it up the steps again in 2025 then Lynch’s contribution will have been more crucial than anybody’s. He was looking close to his best against Tipperary and Waterford, which helps Limerick a lot.
Without Lynch, they are simply an excellent team made up of the some of the most skilful and physically imposing hurlers we’ve seen. With him fit and on form, they are close to unplayable. It’s not just that he’s a nine out of 10 performer. Everybody in his realm of contact, more than half the team, sees their mark out of 10 go up a point or two for his presence. The cumulative effect is too much for any opposition to handle.
This score from Cian Lynch in the Munster final really doesn’t get the love it deserves 🔥
He makes others look good in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious is in how he buys them time and space; something rare and valuable at this level.
Just one way is Lynch’s a capacity to win ruck ball without steaming in and emerging, heroic, with the sliotar in his fist and three opponents giving furious chase. Instead he’ll hover around the outskirts, primed like a viper sizing up a mouse that has no idea it will soon be halfway to the predator’s belly.
By the time opponents are aware Lynch has possession he’s danced away on his light feet, and passed the ball to a teammate with the perfect weight and pace so they can take it in their stride and use that precious extra second to plan and carry out their next move.
Oftentimes the pass that Lynch will give is one you’ll not have seen until it happens, which is extraordinary. The oldest cliche about any game is that it’s easy to play from the stand. You have a 360-degree perspective for every player, and you’re not fatigued and under immediate physical pressure from the other team. Of course you know where the ball should go. To see a player in the fray make the right decision time and again is rare. Lynch takes it a step further. He does things which even those looking on are surprised by. That’s what you get with him: speed of thought and quality of thought.
You can see his St Kevin’s soccer background in the balance and mental agility; the capacity to scan numerous times a minute so it looks as if he has panoramic vision – and the quickness of foot to evade trouble and find space.
The balance he would have inherited with or without the soccer you’d imagine, his uncle Ciarán Carey had the same elasticity and bounce. And as Lynch explained to The 42 way back in 2014, he has more than one notable relative.
“Pa, my uncle was on the minor in ’84, my grand uncle, Eamonn Carey, was on it ’58, the last time before ’84 that they won it.”
We can at least credit soccer with the fact that he seems to be wearing Mizuno boots these past few years and wore Copa Mundials until a lot more recently than most which shows a general appreciation for the finer things.
He managed to combine travelling to Dublin to train at soccer with playing for Limerick underage teams, which is a feat considering how much focus it takes to make progress in either code. Back then he also said scouts had told his father that they’d take a look at him “but they never follow it through”.
Even when you consider the ludicrously long odds of landing a professional football contract, this seems a bad miss on their part. Lynch is the best thinker in Irish sport, and it’s not even close to whoever might be second. You’d put him in a room with a pen and pad and expect him to emerge with the housing crisis and cost of living crisis solved in 45 minutes. To be less flippant, you’d definitely play him at No 8 in Heimir Hallgrimsson’s team. Lynch sees things where others do not.
And we’re privileged to be able to see him consistently at the minute. Before the Munster championship, my colleague Fintan sent around questions to a bunch of us, one of which was who are you looking forward to seeing play this year. I said Darragh McCarthy, and am indeed keenly anticipating his return on Sunday. Yet when Tipp played Limerick first day out I realised my answer was ill-thought out. As soon as the ball was thrown in the mind went straight to – where is Lynch? Will he be on the ball soon?
Because he’s 29 now and has been around for more than a decade we can perhaps take for granted his level. Well, I did anyway. You have to remind yourself that his is an artistry that comes around once a generation if we’re lucky. It’s possible to come up with a list players of similar impact, and probably superior stickmanship, so far this century. But for me at least Lynch has no peer when it comes to the marriage of intellect and movement, vision and execution.
Lynch is a man of faith and has studied many religions as well as the one he practises. There is a discernible spiritual element to what he does on the pitch: that calmness in a moment and serene awareness of everything going on. When he’s in his flow he can appear so at one with the scene, and yet devastating in his ability to alter that picture; do with it as he likes.
There will be 100 dramas playing out at any one time when Limerick and Cork play on Sunday, all vital, all fascinating. And at any moment it will pay to look away and see what Lynch is doing. But you don’t need advice from me or anybody else to do that. Like a lot of what he does, it will just feel natural.
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If Limerick get over the line in 2025, Cian Lynch will be the difference maker
A PHRASE YOU hear a bit around the Cork team this past while is ‘dampening down the hype’.
The second-half fadeout in the league final. The loss of focus and discipline that led to Clare’s comeback. The sloppiness against Tipperary’s 14 men for much of the second half. Dampening down the hype! Keep that expectation from a success-hungry public in check.
I’m not sure about all this. If Cork are going to win this All-Ireland then at some stage soon they’re going to have to take that hype and fire a large can of petrol over it.
That’s what a win would do in Limerick on Sunday. It’s a game that’s too close to call. I’d back Limerick for the most simple reason that they’re playing better and look to be improving.
The performance against Waterford was assured and quietly devastating. They made a fine team look rushed and blunt, while not engaging their own higher gears. To keep this spluttery combustion engine imagery going, Cork are the fastest racing car but Limerick perhaps have the superior average speed.
Until Cork find a way to keep their levels more consistent, or at least limit the amount of minutes they drift out of games, then it’s hard to see them winning the All-Ireland we’re told by many an astute judge ‘they won’t leave behind this time’.
So I think Limerick will win on Sunday, though I’d be nowhere near putting much cash behind that conviction.
There is one hurling bet I’ll be making this summer, though. Cian Lynch is available at 11/1 to win the hurler of the year award.
This, to me, is almost as good as an 11/1 bet on Limerick winning the All-Ireland. Yes, I know Aaron Gillane or Gearoid Heagerty or Shane O’Brien could catch fire. And I know Cork contained Lynch fairly well last year. And I realise his injury problems since 2022, ankle and in particular hamstring, make it tougher for him to hit those 2018 to 2021 standards where he was twice the hurler of the year.
But I’m convinced if Limerick make it up the steps again in 2025 then Lynch’s contribution will have been more crucial than anybody’s. He was looking close to his best against Tipperary and Waterford, which helps Limerick a lot.
Without Lynch, they are simply an excellent team made up of the some of the most skilful and physically imposing hurlers we’ve seen. With him fit and on form, they are close to unplayable. It’s not just that he’s a nine out of 10 performer. Everybody in his realm of contact, more than half the team, sees their mark out of 10 go up a point or two for his presence. The cumulative effect is too much for any opposition to handle.
He makes others look good in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious is in how he buys them time and space; something rare and valuable at this level.
Just one way is Lynch’s a capacity to win ruck ball without steaming in and emerging, heroic, with the sliotar in his fist and three opponents giving furious chase. Instead he’ll hover around the outskirts, primed like a viper sizing up a mouse that has no idea it will soon be halfway to the predator’s belly.
By the time opponents are aware Lynch has possession he’s danced away on his light feet, and passed the ball to a teammate with the perfect weight and pace so they can take it in their stride and use that precious extra second to plan and carry out their next move.
Oftentimes the pass that Lynch will give is one you’ll not have seen until it happens, which is extraordinary. The oldest cliche about any game is that it’s easy to play from the stand. You have a 360-degree perspective for every player, and you’re not fatigued and under immediate physical pressure from the other team. Of course you know where the ball should go. To see a player in the fray make the right decision time and again is rare. Lynch takes it a step further. He does things which even those looking on are surprised by. That’s what you get with him: speed of thought and quality of thought.
You can see his St Kevin’s soccer background in the balance and mental agility; the capacity to scan numerous times a minute so it looks as if he has panoramic vision – and the quickness of foot to evade trouble and find space.
The balance he would have inherited with or without the soccer you’d imagine, his uncle Ciarán Carey had the same elasticity and bounce. And as Lynch explained to The 42 way back in 2014, he has more than one notable relative.
“Pa, my uncle was on the minor in ’84, my grand uncle, Eamonn Carey, was on it ’58, the last time before ’84 that they won it.”
We can at least credit soccer with the fact that he seems to be wearing Mizuno boots these past few years and wore Copa Mundials until a lot more recently than most which shows a general appreciation for the finer things.
He managed to combine travelling to Dublin to train at soccer with playing for Limerick underage teams, which is a feat considering how much focus it takes to make progress in either code. Back then he also said scouts had told his father that they’d take a look at him “but they never follow it through”.
Even when you consider the ludicrously long odds of landing a professional football contract, this seems a bad miss on their part. Lynch is the best thinker in Irish sport, and it’s not even close to whoever might be second. You’d put him in a room with a pen and pad and expect him to emerge with the housing crisis and cost of living crisis solved in 45 minutes. To be less flippant, you’d definitely play him at No 8 in Heimir Hallgrimsson’s team. Lynch sees things where others do not.
And we’re privileged to be able to see him consistently at the minute. Before the Munster championship, my colleague Fintan sent around questions to a bunch of us, one of which was who are you looking forward to seeing play this year. I said Darragh McCarthy, and am indeed keenly anticipating his return on Sunday. Yet when Tipp played Limerick first day out I realised my answer was ill-thought out. As soon as the ball was thrown in the mind went straight to – where is Lynch? Will he be on the ball soon?
Because he’s 29 now and has been around for more than a decade we can perhaps take for granted his level. Well, I did anyway. You have to remind yourself that his is an artistry that comes around once a generation if we’re lucky. It’s possible to come up with a list players of similar impact, and probably superior stickmanship, so far this century. But for me at least Lynch has no peer when it comes to the marriage of intellect and movement, vision and execution.
Lynch is a man of faith and has studied many religions as well as the one he practises. There is a discernible spiritual element to what he does on the pitch: that calmness in a moment and serene awareness of everything going on. When he’s in his flow he can appear so at one with the scene, and yet devastating in his ability to alter that picture; do with it as he likes.
There will be 100 dramas playing out at any one time when Limerick and Cork play on Sunday, all vital, all fascinating. And at any moment it will pay to look away and see what Lynch is doing. But you don’t need advice from me or anybody else to do that. Like a lot of what he does, it will just feel natural.
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