It's not that teams want to avoid to getting to a national final, but with championship only two weeks away, if you do get to the league final, preparation-wise and trying to get the group together, it is hard.
Limerick have named a very strong team. Maybe 12 or 13 guys that will be there or thereabouts as championship starters.
A good welcome back for Sean Finn is that he’s down to mark TJ Reid. That will be a serious battle. He’s in at full-back, you would normally see him corner-back but the guy has the physicality, he has the hurling.
In the Limerick full-back line alone, Mike Casey and Dan Morrissey are not featuring, so if you’re Sean Finn, what a quality player he is but he’s nearly under pressure to try and keep his place there with everyone around him going so well.
Cathal O’Neill is down to play wing-back alongside Diarmaid Byrnes and Declan Hannon, two-thirds of the half-back line we have seen for a number of years. He has probably been Limerick’s best player of the league so far and again is probably under pressure to make championship. The same with Adam English.
Limerick and Kilkenny have both gone really strong so there is good intent there to see.
It’s hard to see anything other than Limerick coming through it. I’ve seen them three times this year and they have been getting stronger week by week. This could be the year that they are at their strongest.
I think Sunday is a great opportunity for Tipperary. Tipp are the last team out in the Liam MacCarthy as they’re not playing the first weekend (21 April).
They’ll have a few guys, relative newcomers, that will want to prove a point to Liam Cahill. The likes of Sean Ryan, Craig Morgan coming back from injury, they will want to be on the championship team.
It’s a great opportunity for Tipp to really go at it. We won’t know the teams until later tonight and I always think the statement of intent is in the team you name, do you really want to go at it?
I think Liam Cahill will really want to go at this, they’ll want to get to a league final regardless of who is in it, because they have that extra week’s grace.
The flip side of it is they are playing a team in Clare who, in my opinion, have the second-strongest panel in the country. It depends again how Brian Lohan names the team.
If Clare and Limerick were to win you would have a league final with them and two weeks later you have Clare and Limerick in the championship again.
If they did both get through, it would be hard to blame either team maybe not fully going at that game knowing that the big one, the championship, is coming in two weeks’ time.
Limerick: N Quaid; B Nash, S Finn, A Costelloe; D Byrnes, D Hannon, C O’Neill; W O’Donoghue, C Lynch; G Hegarty, A English, T Morrissey; A Gillane, D Ó Dáilaigh, P Casey.
Kilkenny: E. Murphy; S. Murphy, H. Lawlor, T. Walsh; D. Blanchfield, P. Deegan (c), C. Buckley; C. Kenny, J. Molloy; A. Mullen, J. Donnelly, B. Ryan; E. Cody, T.J. Reid, L. Hogan.
Shane McGrath was speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland
