In the modern game of hurling has the gym become more important than the skills? Has possession trumped shooting opportunities or hurling off the cuff?
I pose these questions with the most open of minds.
I was never the biggest hitter in terms of physicality. I could hold my own, but I will never forget two shoulders I got in my career.
The first was from Brian Geary during the 2007 trilogy of games between ourselves and Limerick. He lined me up from 20 yards out. As soon as I had popped the ball off, it was bang, straight into the chest. No free, play away. I found myself under the Mackey Stand in the old dressing rooms having to get my breath back via an oxygen mask. It was some dunt from a man mountain.
The second was from Michael Fennelly in the 2011 All-Ireland final. I received the ball near the sideline and as I was turning, he met me with a fair, but hefty shoulder that nearly lifted me into the upper tier of the Davin Stand. At the time Fennelly was a giant amongst men in the hurling world, but he could hurl too. Nowadays the Michael Fennelly size and strength is almost the entry level for inter-county hurling.
I was lucky to be involved with the UL Fitzgibbon team over the past two years and the players would laugh at my bench press or squat bests that they would see merely as warm up sets to them.
I understand that these athletes have been shown how to perform and see results in the gym from the age of 14. I was eight years into my Tipp career before I was shown what a chin-up actually looked like with a full lock out of the arms.
There's no doubt the current crop have been better educated from a much younger age, but are we losing certain players, who undoubtedly have the skill but just can’t hit the numbers in the gym?
Hurling has never been played at such a pace, but I feel the game has lost some of its romance and excitement with the reduced number of high fielding plays or even allowing someone lump it in into the dangerzone.
Those moments have the crowd on the edge of their seats wondering what way it might break or who will come out of the ball. We still see some glimpses of this wild aspect, but they are few and far between.
To be clear, this is not a fault of inter-county players or coaches, but rather the style of the game right now.
We have the facilities to analyse every play and we can get these results in real time. Every team plays to a system that incorporates the highest percentage of maintaining possession, so balls rained down on top of a half-back line, or one v one battles don’t always tally with this outlook.
There are not as many 50:50 scraps for possession as, quite often, the ball will only be delivered if the split is closer to 70:30.
The war cry of "will ye let it in?" can mostly be uncalled for but sometimes it’s actually right.
I remember before the 2008 Munster final, our great coach Eamon O’Shea had spotted one of our players was quite nervous before the game. He grabbed his hurley and wrote the word "Freedom" on it. I am not sure if it made any difference on the day, but the fact he thought to write it and wanted to emphasise that this game is about that and playing on instinct showed how brilliant the man was and still is.
I am really not trying to down the current game, but rather highlight an area where the spectacle has lost some of its magic.
I know this is the feeling of many whom I meet walking out from games when I am on radio duty or when I attend.
Hurling was always and should always be about the unknown, the something happening in a blink of an eye that nobody saw coming but will be talked about for years to come, the magic of the fastest game played on grass on our planet.
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