So often the most anticipated matches can fail to live up to their promise. That was emphatically not the case at Croke Park yesterday. Kilkenny and Tipperary played out a master class in skill and guts, instinct and inspiration.
They did so before a packed crowd of 82,300 in Dublin and a TV audience through RTÉ Sport, Sky Sports and GAA Go that will have been larger than that for any other GAA event.
After the intervention of HawkEye, the teams will have to do it all over again in three weeks time. When John ‘Bubbles’ O’Dwyer stood over his last second, 90 metre free he knew that it was possible for him to win the All Ireland with one crisp swing and clean strike. As the sliothar sailed towards the Davin Stand end it looked as though he had made it.
Tipp Roar
The Tipp roar gathered at the back of throats but caught as the umpire chose to draw a square in the air rather than wave his white flag for a point. He was right as assistive technology showed the ball sail wide and the game of inches swung back Kilkenny’s way and the whistle went for a third draw in three years after none since 1959.
Two of the most important people in the camps over the next three weeks will be Damien Young for Tipp and Mick Dempsey for the cats. Neither of their names will appear on the team sheets but both will be crucial as the performance analyst in each camp.
Slice and Dice
It will be their responsibility to slice and dice the puck outs of Gleeson and Murphy, the possessions of Corbett and Power, the passing transitions that led to each point. They will deliver their report and provide the ammunition that Brian Cody and Eamon O’Shea will then use to eke out the marginal gain that could lead to their seeing Liam McCarthy hoisted high on September 27th.
Some of the software they will use will be that provided by Irish company Avenir Sports who sent out a note on Friday wishing good luck to all the teams in action at the weekend that they have a relationship with. They included both teams in action at Croke Park, all four rugby provinces opening their Guinness Pro12 season and the Republic of Ireland team who got the Euro 2016 campaign off to a winning start in Tbilisi last night.
Analysis has become crucial to success at the top flight. In the US Tennis Open semi final on Saturday night Sky’s coverage showed the placement of Marin Cilic’s serves against Roger Federer. It revealed that Cilic had increased the percentage of serves into one side of Federer’s game from an average of 40% through the tournament to 70% over the course of his straight sets win.
Mapped
These changes do not happen by chance. They are planned and mapped out to give a game plan that takes as much account of an opponents weakness as your own team or player’s strengths.
The only way to forecast the future is to learn the lessons of history. That is what will be starting this morning in the Tipperary and Kilkenny camps, in the analysis suites at Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht and in sporting organisations up and down the country and around the world.
Game of Inches
As coach Tony D’Amato says in Any Given Sunday:
“You find out life’s this game of inches. And so is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small.
I mean… one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow too fast, you don’t quite catch it.
The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch.
Because we know when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the difference between winning and losing.
Tipperary will count the inches of the crossbar, the two saved penalties and Hawkeye this morning. They they will sit down and try to win them back with the help of analysts using Irish supplied software.
There is a lot to be proud of in that.
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