'Tis only the league' is a phrase of the past. We are all programmed in such a way it takes us all a while to adapt to change, whether is it right or wrong.
The league nowadays is a lot different to the league, 10, 15 or even five years ago. If you go back to the noughties, it was useful in order to get up to speed, but it was a long way off championship.
Now, the league and the championship are so close together, that you nearly have to be at full throttle come the end of it. Do you think Michael Fennelly or Cheddar Plunkett are thinking "'tis only the league' after their beatings at the weekend?
Do you think Galway manager Henry Shefflin was going back up the road after Saturday night's win over Limerick thinking 'tis only the league'?
He was in his eye.
He knows damn well that a message had been sent out. You can't win an All-Ireland through your league campaign, but I firmly believe you can lose it.
The league will stand to you if you perform well, but if you are a long way off, it's hard to build momentum back up in a short space of time. It's so difficult to build confidence within a group if things don’t start going your way.
Talk about adapting to change brings me on nicely to Kilkenny and Tipperary. Firstly, I ruffled a few feathers during the week when I said how poor a game it was last Sunday, and it was far from my intention.
I have grown up watching the two counties, be it in league or championship, tear shreds out of each other for 70 minutes, turning many of the encounters into classics.
You wouldn’t get an inch, every score you got was hard earned, and a couple of scraps were always thrown in as well.
It was dog eat dog stuff.
Secondly, coming back to adapting to change, I have heard a lot of 'this isn’t how Kilkenny should be hurling' and likewise with Tipp. Well, failure to adapt to change will see the Premier County and the Cats simply left behind.
The days of gathering a ball at you own full or half-back line and launching it 80 yards are over. Yes of course at times it will be required, but in the main, it just doesn’t work.
The quality on show last Sunday was a long way off what you would expect from both teams
If you see teams trying to do the right thing, and breaking down every now and then, at least they are trying to achieve best practice. When you don’t have the ball, it's about hitting from the front, side and behind.
The space that was afforded in Thurles last Sunday by both teams was incredible, surely nobody can deny that?
The quality on show last Sunday was a long way off what you would expect from both teams, surely nobody can deny that? Especially when you see the hits, physicality, and lack of space that was in the Gaelic Grounds the night before.
It has been said that the second half was better, but I'm not so sure. The difference between the first half, and the second half, is the game is coming to a close, and if there isn’t much in it on the scoreboard, it becomes an exciting watch.
Just because something is exciting, doesn’t mean the quality or intensity is much better then what it was.
Yes, both teams are in a transition period. And with this you need time, patience, and work. From everybody aligned: management, players, county board and supporters.
But Tipp and Kilkenny have been extremely lucky.
For a long long time now, they have been treated to some of the best hurlers we will ever see. Now it's time for both counties to blood in a new crop and unearth the next great hurlers.
While at the same time introducing a style that maybe has been alien to the counties, but is required in the current climate.
So the question I ponder now is - is it only the league and they will come right for the championship, or do both managers at this point know there is a lot to be done?
Limerick and Galway was as close to a championship match as you will see in February. It was a great watch in an intense environment. It made you realise what you were missing in the last two years.
Limerick looked so much better from their defeat in round one to Wexford. With this weekend off they will get in a great and badly needed bank of two weeks' work.
It is a psychological advantage for Galway having got one over the All-Ireland champions, but they did that last year too and never followed up.
Nobody likes to witness the scorelines that were seen at Walsh Park and Cork's demolition of Offaly in Birr. We would all love to see these counties competing at a much closer level. I know Offaly are doing a lot of good work and you would hope to see the fruits of that over the coming months.
Laois seem to have regressed since Eddie Brennan left. I'm sure Waterford took little satisfaction in easing to a 33-point winning margin, but they were ruthless from the very start, and Liam Cahill said afterwards that they want to make Walsh Park a very hard place to come ahead of the summer.
The game of the weekend though was the hurling club final in Croke Park.
Bar a 15-minute period in the first half, it just didn’t look like it was going to be Ballygunner's day. They played within themselves, and if they did happen to be beaten they would have been very disappointed for not playing to their potential.
But they don’t have to worry about that now. King Harry saved the day. Fair play to him. For someone to have that memory for the rest of their days is special, and he will always been known as the man that got Ballygunner over the line.
That goal will be on repeat in the pubs and parishes of Ballygunner for a long time to come. And so it should be.
