Sunday, February 21

Allianz Hurling League Division IA

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Kilkenny v Tipperary, Nowlan Park, 2pm (Live on TG4)

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Anyone looking into Kilkenny’s four-point defeat to Waterford last Sunday for potential chinks in the All-Ireland champions’ armour could do worse than to remember that the Cats had to beat Clare in a play-off to avoid relegation from the top tier last spring.

On this weekend in 2015, Brian Cody’s side were walloped by Dublin (0-25 to 3-11) at Nowlan Park and lost to Galway a week later. In Round 4, Tipperary taught them a lesson, Kilkenny falling to a 12-point loss in Semple Stadium, their third in a row in the competition.

The Cats stayed up thanks to two one-point wins over Clare and we all know what happened next: Kilkenny were All-Ireland champions in September, as if everything that happened before the summer was a mirage.

On Sunday, however, Cody and Kilkenny will be very keen to put Tipperary back in their place good and early in the season after Michael Ryan’s reconstructed side scored a big win over Dublin last Saturday night, making their case impressively for the 2016 season despite a close season of huge flux in terms of personnel, both on and off the field.

If there was an assumption that Tipperary would take time to find their feet this year, they blew that out of the water with the stand-out performance of the opening weekend. Short front-line forwards John O’Dwyer and Séamus Callanan, Jason Forde stepped up to the plate with a contribution of 1-5 from play.

At 23, Forde is not a new face, but he was yet to explode in the manner he did in the Thurles mud last weekend, while the McGrath brothers, John and Noel, worked superbly for their new manager. Conor Kenny and Tomás Hamill also slotted seamlessly into the side at full-forward and full-back respectively.

What was immediately apparent from the game was Tipperary’s migration to a much more direct approach under Ryan, who encourages his players to let the ball go long and early and banks on his forwards to win breaking ball, which they did to brilliant effect in Thurles. Forde's goal was a perfect illustration of the tactic's simple efficacy. 

While that policy worked brilliantly against a patched-up Dublin defence, it will be interesting to see if they persist with those tactics against Kilkenny, who in Pádraig Walsh, Kieran Joyce and Cillian Buckley possess three of the best ball-winning half-back lines in the country, while Paul Murphy relishes aerial battles in his corner more than any other defender in the game.

Kilkenny are without Eoin Larkin, Michael Fennelly and Ger Aylward from last year’s All-Ireland winning side, but they put out a strong team in Waterford and would have been disappointed to cede ground to one of their potential rivals this year, who struck an eye-watering 18 wides, scoring just three points from play in the process. The assessment that they were outfought by Waterford would not have sat well with Cody, either.

Tipperary and Kilkenny usually go at it full tilt in the Allianz League. With Kilkenny looking for a reaction after last Sunday’s defeat to Waterford and Tipperary keen to prove their win over Dublin wasn’t a one-off, this should be another full-blooded encounter between two sides with a history of producing cracking contests, even at this time of year. 

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