Combined with the World Cup, there’s enough GAA action to ensure that your ass won’t move from the couch this weekend.
Storyline of the weekend: The crunch qualifier between Tipperary and Galway is arguably more exciting because it’s win or bust for both sides, but having covered that game in more detail here, we’re going to go for Sunday’s Leinster Hurling Final between Dublin and Kilkenny instead.
The fact that the loser will still be in the championship come Sunday evening doesn’t take away from the significance of the game, mind, because there are loads of interesting subplots that should make it an encounter to savour.
Lest we forget, Dublin are going into the game as reigning Leinster Champions. Thanks to an unspectacular league campaign and their thoroughly professional defeat of Wexford in Wexford Park in the semi-final, Anthony Daly’s men have barely surfaced on the radar at all in the last couple of months. On the other hand, thanks to a titanic league final, blitzing Offaly in the first ever GAA game on Sky Sports and back to back games with Galway, Kilkenny have barely been off it.
The low-key build up will suit Dublin but don’t be fooled into thinking that they’re the only ones going into the game with something to prove. It must be hard for a manager as successful as Brian Cody to keep pulling motivational tricks out of the bag, but he doesn’t forget defeats in a hurry and you get the sense that last year’s defeat to Dublin is an itch that won’t be scratched until they put them away in a big game, as they have the opportunity to do on Sunday.
Galway were a decent test for the Cats but Dublin have climbed above Galway in the pecking order as challengers for the Leinster and All-Ireland titles and we expect them to pose Cody’s men a new set of problems to what they’ve faced so far.
What Cody has learned from Kilkenny’s three championship outings – notice the positional changes the last day – to what Daly has learned in one could prove crucial and we expect that it will end up being the difference between the sides on Sunday. If it does happen, don’t write off Dublin; they’re not going anywhere for a while yet.
Keep an eye out for… where exactly Cork and Kerry are at. It’s hard to look beyond Dublin as All-Ireland winners at this stage, but none of the competition in Leinster are amongst the top five or six teams in the country; these two certainly are and it will be interesting to see what levels they reach on Sunday.
Johnny Buckley can’t quite believe Paul Galvin falling over in last year’s Munster Final
We learned little from their respective meetings with Tipperary and Clare about what we can expect, but the line of thinking seems to be that Cork have more to offer, especially with such a potent forward division and a style of play which suits that forward division, which couldn’t really be said for Cork under Conor Counihan.
James O Donoghue’s return is a huge boost but this might be the first game where we can quantify just how massive a loss the Gooch is to Kerry; we have Cork to win this one by three or four points.
Game likely to be the subject of least discussion on The Sunday Game: While the qualifiers are still in their early stages there are a lot of games that will only merit a few minutes on The Sunday Game and we reckon that Wicklow v Sligo in Aughrim might not be the highest on the priority list this weekend.
Jim White mis-pronounced word of the weekend: The names on the programme for Clare’s qualifier clash with Wexford on Saturday should pose no problems for Jim, but we’d love to see what he makes of Davy Fitz’s unique pre-match interview demeanour if he’s at this craic again in Cusack Park…
Bet of the weekend: Armagh v Monaghan, no goals @ 9/2
Armagh surprised us a little bit by how closely-matched they appeared to be with Monaghan last weekend, but what did not surprise us was the defensive set-up adopted by both sides.
Ulster football is often unfairly pigeon-holed but last Saturday’s clash – which was still very entertaining – lived up to the hard-fought and incredibly intense stereotype and we expect no different this weekend.
Jamie Clarke, Conor McManus and Kieran Hughes to name three might think otherwise but we think that repeat of the goalless clash played out last weekend is a very tempting shout at 9/2.
Did you know? The all-Munster affair between Kerry and Cork is hardly what you’d call a novelty clash by any stretch of the imagination, but we were still taken aback to learn just how many times the sides have met in Championship in recent seasons.
Since 2000, for example, the two sides have met 24 times in Championship football; there are teams in Ireland who wouldn’t have had much more than 24 Championship games over the same period.
Kerry have a clear upper hand over the Rebels with 14 wins since the turn of the millennium but the general consensus is that they’ll have their work cut out trying to make it 15 on Sunday. That said, defeat will hardly be that devastating a blow; barring a miracle, both of them will still be very much in contention come the August Bank Holiday weekend.
