KILLINAN END - Sliding Doors Games

Strange circumstances were always going to surround our League joust with the All-Ireland champions. It would have been odd indeed to play an away League match on our own turf in Thurles against Limerick. It is just as strange to be heading to Páirc Uí Chaoimh to an away League game which is not against Cork.

It is not our first meeting with Limerick in the League on Leeside. Cork was the scene of a significant tussle just over half a century ago when they teams clashed in the National League Final of 1971. That was part of a remarkable and extremely close sequence of games between the counties that year and indeed throughout the first half of the 1970s.

The counties met four times in competitive hurling in 1971 and but for Tipp’s decision not to participate in the Oireachtas Cup it would’ve been five. The most storied occasion of them all was, of course, that drenched day in Killarney in late July when John Flanagan’s late score brought the laurels home to Tipp. That was dramatised by Raymond Smith in his recall of Mick Mackey saying to Jackie Power on the pitch in Killarney after the final whistle – “what brought us to this place? “- as if the venue was a decisive factor in the result. Every aspect it seemed was probed when trying to explain a loss.

That Munster Final defeat, which came on foot of Limerick’s dethroning of All-Ireland champions, Cork, must have weighed heavily. The time seemed to be primed for a Limerick hurling renaissance alright. Reaching a League Final in 1970 against Cork was a mini-breakthrough for a county that had been starved of national limelight. This was only Limerick’s second national final since the 1947 League Final win over Kilkenny.

A narrow defeat against Wexford in the 1958 League Final suggested a second coming for those unlikely Munster champions of 1955. For a time in 1956 a new more dominant era threatened before Cork came off the ropes in the Munster Final and restored the old order. The narrow League final defeat against Wexford two years later alongside an All-Ireland Minor final win reinvigorated that promise. Instead, Shannonside stocks slumped dramatically. The 1960s was long and largely barren at Senior level despite deceptive chinks of light in 1966.

In the context of those wilderness years even a mere League Final appearance in 1970 was a relief. Small mercies maybe but it heralded good tidings to come. Little did even the most optimistic Limerick supporter realise that it would be 1975 before the county would not be in a League Final again, with two Munster championships around the corner as well.

The first joust with Tipp in 1971 was a routine League game at the Gaelic Grounds won by Limerick 0-13 to 1-8 on 18th April. What followed looks utterly strange to modern eyes where there’s hardly time to play off the fixtures such is the hurry to get it all done. That result in Limerick left Tipp and Limerick level on points. The very next Sunday the teams lined out again in Croke Park where Limerick won 2-15 to 1-15. This was a play-off to see who played a quarter-final and who played in the semi-final. Four weeks down the road they did the dance all over again, this time at the old Cork Athletic Grounds in the League Final.

By the month of May the developing rivalry was clear in the ferocity of the exchanges which bordered on reckless at times. At one stage, a Limerick midfielder was fouled when threw the ball up and aimed the stroke at the offending Tipperary player. The referee did not raise an eyebrow. It was day of swaying fortunes and again Limerick came up trumps – this time by a point. Richie Bennis’s last-ditch score foreshadowed what would come in the 1973 Munster Final.

Pat Hartigan has maintained that this was the best Limerick team of that era, and that 1971 was an All-Ireland lost. That team was trained by Joe McGrath who had come from Downpatrick in county Down and played a leading part in the innovate coaching that had taken root in those years. It might not be realised by many, but football’s McGrath Cup is named after him – he was coach of the Cork football team that caught Kerry with a last-minute Munster Final goal in 1983.

He was not around when Limerick won in 1973. He was not alone. Remarkably considering Pat Hartigan’s view of that 1971 team, only eight of Limerick’s successful League winning team started the 1973 All-Ireland Final. Perhaps even more curiously only nine of Tipp’s League Final team lined out in September 1971 when Tadhg O’Connor brought home the MacCarthy Cup. Babs Keating claimed that if Limerick had lost the League Final, they might have found the extra percentages to win the Munster Final instead. Certainly, whatever the venue, there was very little between these teams as the one-score margins show.