The Limerick-Kilkenny rivalry started 126 years ago when the counties met in the 1897 All-Ireland final. At that time, clubs represented the county and Kilfinane beat Tullaroan 3-4 to 2-4 in a final played on November 20th, 1898.
In a supplement to the Irish Independent 37 years later to mark the golden jubilee of the GAA, Kilfinane’s Seán Óg Hanley was included among the great players of the first 50 years.
“Against Tullaroan in the All-Ireland final of 1897, Seán Óg Hanley was the best man of the 34. The name and fame of his prowess that day in Tipperary swept through Ireland from end to end.”
Hanley’s name was actually James but he reminded locals of his grandfather Seán, who had been a famous athlete in earlier times.
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Six feet one inch and 14 stone, he played in central defence and when PD Mehigan, long-serving GAA correspondent of this newspaper, was asked in the 1950s to pick his best hurling team, he named Hanley at full back.
A few months after winning Limerick’s first All-Ireland, he moved to Dublin and from there to England where, “little suited to the fogs and fumes of London”, he failed to look after a cold and died on August 24th, 1915. He was only 38.
His grave at Kensal Green was restored by the Limerick Exiles Association in 2010 and, that February, the county footballers, playing a league match in London, visited the memorial to pay their respects.
A week later, Blackrock secured Limerick’s first club All-Ireland, winning the 2010 junior final against St Colmcille’s of Tyrone. Blackrock was founded as the modern amalgamation of Kilfinane and Ardpatrick.
Captain Brendan Hennessey was aware of the history.
“I can’t get over this – I’m standing on the steps of the Hogan Stand in Croke Park. One hundred and thirteen years ago Seán Óg Hanley brought an All-Ireland cup back to Kilfinane. It gives me great pride, and great honour, to do the same today.”
So, we meet again
Sunday is the first instance of back-to-back All-Ireland finals contested by the same counties since Kilkenny and Tipperary concluded a run of three 12 years ago. All told, it has happened 13 times that a final pairing has been repeated the following year.
Seven times the result has switched and six times it remained the same. Fifty years ago, Limerick beat Kilkenny but lost to them 12 months later. The same happened in reverse order in 1935 and 1936.
Overall, Kilkenny experienced this seven times and have never lost an All-Ireland final to the same county in successive years. On a more restricted sample of two occasions, both against this weekend’s opponents, neither have Limerick.
Crestfallen top guns
Regardless of Sunday’s outcome, one accolade looks to be settled. TJ Reid trailed Galway’s Evan Niland by five points in this year’s championship top scorer lists and, with the Ballyhale sharpshooter averaging more than 0-10 per match, the likelihood is that he will take the top spot for 2023.
It’s an achievement that comes with some trepidation in that it is all of 10 years since the All-Ireland champions supplied the championship’s top scorer when Colin Ryan of Clare took the honours.
Since then, all of the hurlers who have ended the season in that place have not been able to add an All-Ireland medal. Should Kilkenny lose at the weekend and Reid score more than 0-5, it would mean that he will have top-scored in three championships without winning Liam MacCarthy: this year, last year and in 2019.
Numbers game: 8
In the 26 years since the era of knock-out came to an end in hurling, All-Ireland finals between provincial champions have been very much the exception rather than the rule, with only eight finals coming in to that category. Every one of them has involved Kilkenny.
Sunday will actually see history made as it will be the first time that there have been successive All-Irelands between two provincial champions since the format was adopted for 1997.
In words
“It’s not for the want of trying. Mossie [Martin Keoghan] was very unlucky. He did brilliantly to create the chance for himself – just unfortunate it went the other side but overall I think our play was very good.”
– Kilkenny manager Derek Lyng when asked about the team’s failure to score goals after the round-robin draw against Galway last April in UPMC Nowlan Park, and the presumed need for them in the weeks ahead. His intuition that the general play was very good would be borne out over the following five matches, which saw Kilkenny score 15 goals, an average of three per match, drawing a blank only against Dublin.
