Gearóid Hegarty and Tom Morrissey ‘the line that sets Limerick apart from everyone else'

Irish Times

16 hours ago

They made their
championship
debuts on the same day: June 19th, 2016.
Limerick
deployed Gearóid Hegarty on Pádraic Maher, as a one-man anti-missile defence. Tom Morrissey came on 10 minutes before Hegarty was replaced and scored a worthless goal in stoppage time.
Tipperary
played with 14 men for over an hour and still won. It was Limerick's night before Limerick's day.
For Morrissey and Hegarty, their glittering futures were not a figment of anyone's imagination yet. Hegarty had begun the year on the Limerick football panel because that was the only offer on the table. Morrissey was a couple of years younger than Hegarty but some of his peers from the under-21 squad were on a faster track. After Tipp, Limerick met Westmeath in the first round of the qualifiers and Morrissey played no part.
You know what happened in the end: the All-Irelands, the awards, the acclaim, the Marvel Comics stuff. In a team of difference-makers and rainmakers and Hall of Famers, Morrissey and Hegarty became essential. The yeast in the loaf.
In the Munster final on Saturday, they will make their 50th championship appearance together. On every other line in the Limerick team there have been degrees of flux: different centrefield partnerships, rotation among the inside forwards, churn in the full-back line. At 10 and 12, though, Morrissey and Hegarty have stood as pillars.
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'That is the line that sets Limerick apart from everyone else,' says Barry Cleary, co-founder of GAA Insights and who has worked as an analyst with a range of intercounty teams in recent years. 'Everyone else struggles with their half-forward line – chopping and changing. Those two lads, they're just dominant in those positions. They go up and down [the flank] and up and down. You look at other teams: they have half forwards who can come back the field but can't get back up. Then there's guys who just stay forward. Morrissey and Hegarty do everything.'
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Though their paths converged they didn't start from the same place. Morrissey captained Limerick to win the under-21 All-Ireland in 2017, and while he suffered a run of dull form in the middle of that season and was taken off in the final, scoreless, his potential was not the subject of second thoughts.
For Hegarty, the problem was persuading people to look at him twice and think again. He was a gangly teenager, and like a crossword, he was full of blanks and cryptic clues. For two years he was part of the Limerick minor hurling panel, and in his second season he failed to make the match-day squad. It sounds outlandish now, but not then. It didn't represent a blind spot in anyone's judgment. The clues were obscure.
In his late teens the Limerick footballers saw a blank canvass. Hegarty tells a story from his first gym session with the group in UL. The players were asked to bench press three-quarters of their body weight and Hegarty was paired with Garrett Noonan, who was about the same size. Noonan did 25 reps at 70kg and Hegarty stepped up for his turn.
Gearóid Hegarty, seen here with Dan Morrissey in last month's Round 4 match against Cork in Limerick. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho
'I said, 'Jesus, this can't be too bad,'' said Hegarty. 'I got down and I couldn't even lift the bar. I was never so embarrassed in all my life. I swore to myself, 'That will never happen again'.'
TJ Ryan was manager of the Limerick senior hurlers when Hegarty was eventually called up. 'How raw was he?' Ryan was asked once. 'Oh, jeepers, as raw as could be. I don't even know how you could measure it.'
Hegarty, though, railed against that perception. In his mind it was like stripping down a layer of wallpaper; the blockwork was still there. 'Everyone used to say my hurling was so raw,' he told Larry Ryan a couple of years ago, 'and I'm not much of a hurler. It used to annoy the life out of me. I used to think, 'I only started playing football a couple of years ago. I was always a hurler.' I had lost a bit of the touch, but I knew it would come back.'
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Establishing himself took time. In the jungle, big beasts are not shielded from predators. One night at Limerick training Hegarty wandered into Tom Condon's den and flouted the house rules.
'I suppose as the corner back you'd be swinging off fellas and pulling and dragging,' says Condon now. 'Gearóid got sick of it, and he gave me a dalk of the hurley into the back.
'I turned around and I chased him around the square and I gave him a flake. Nickie Quaid nearly fell over laughing. It was a kind of 'welcome to the panel'. It was the last time he did it. In fairness to the man, he gave it, and he took it.'
As athletes, Morrissey and Hegarty are different specimens. Hegarty is built like a Springbok flanker, standing at 6ft 5in and carrying more than 15 stone; Morrissey is four inches shorter and a stone lighter.
'Tom covers a huge amount of ground, but his running style is laborious,' says Niall Moran, the former Limerick forward and a clubmate of Morrissey's in Ahane. Hegarty, though, has an equine stride.
Tom Morrissey after last year's All-Ireland final. 'A phenomenal leader. He demands respect and he always gets respect,' says Barry Hennessy. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho
'The first 150 [metre run] we did with Joe O'Connor [former Limerick S&C] I was beside Gearóid,' says Barry Hennessy, who was a goalkeeper on the Limerick panel for more than a decade. 'He did the first five metres in two steps. I remember trying to match him stride for stride and I died a death. I got to four [runs] out of six and I was seeing stars.'
As people? Morrissey, says Hennessy, can be 'horizontal', which is a more complex state than you might imagine. 'Fun to be around,' says Moran. 'Great, great company. One hell of a guy. Well able to tune out but when he tunes in, he carries guys with him. A phenomenal leader. He demands respect and he always gets respect.
'In Ahane, we haven't won a county in 22 years and Tom is the man going around saying, 'We have to win a county.' There's nothing impossible to him. There's no glass ceiling over him. Tom doesn't always conform to the common viewpoint. He'll wear his hair the way he wants to. He'll go travelling when he feels like it's the right thing for Tom to do. But he is the quintessential team player. In any other generation he would have made an exceptional Limerick captain.'
Ambition is the fire in Hegarty too: 'He is a winner,' says Hennessy. 'He has a self-confidence but not an arrogance. People who wouldn't know him might say he was arrogant but he's not. He's a winner and he's very confident in his own ability. When things are going against him, he still thinks he can deliver.
'Against Tipp [in the first round of the Munster championship] people might have been saying he didn't have the best day with the ball in his hand, but his tackle count was 16 or 17. It was off the charts.'
With that level of physicality comes risks and because Hegarty plays on the edge he sometimes loses his footing. In the All-Ireland semi-final and final in 2020 he committed 12 fouls and was penalised for 10 frees, without getting booked. His tackle on Joe Canning in the semi-final should have been a straight red. That was also the season when he was the undisputed Hurler of the Year.
Two years later, though, he was sent off twice and on RTÉ Donal Óg Cusack said that Hegarty 'had it coming'. When he was sent off again in the first round of the 2023 championship John Kiely dropped him for the next match.
This is Kiely's ninth season as Limerick manager and the Munster final will be his 50th championship match in the role; in all that time, Hegarty has only been left out three times. Morrissey hasn't been omitted since Kiely's first season in 2017.
Gearóid Hegarty scores a goal in the 2022 All-Ireland final against Kilkenny. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho
Hegarty and Morrissey became the heart and lungs of the team. Their impact on big games became an article of faith. In the All-Ireland finals of 2020, 21 and 22 they scored 3-28 from play, between them. Hegarty has scored more goals in All-Ireland finals than any other round of the championship.
At the height of their dominance Limerick strangled teams in the air and devoured them on primary ball. On puck-outs, Quaid, Hegarty and Morrissey represented the most potent triangle in hurling. In match analysis there are no secrets. Every intercounty team has equal access to RTÉ's high camera footage behind the goal. Limerick's puck-outs have been dissected from every angle and yet nobody has broken the lifeline between Quaid and his wing forwards.
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'In the Cork match a couple of weeks ago I was watching the way Hegarty was shaking off Rob Downey for puck-outs and he makes it look so easy,' says Cleary. 'When you talk about analysis, the most videos I'd show teams is the way Hegarty loses his man on puck-outs. He knows how to make the guy switch off for a second and then he goes. It makes you look stupid.
'Nickie [Quaid] is just watching to see the movement. There's no signals. They leave the zone open and those lads sprint to that zone. If Nickie sees a guy getting a step ahead, he'll hit to that spot. Hegarty makes it look so easy. It even looks like he's plodding and there's lads not able to keep up with him.'
Condon reckons that Morrissey has been Limerick's 'most consistent' player in the Kiely years. The only stain on Hegarty's record is 2023. His form dropped to such a degree that he was the only Limerick starter omitted from the All Star nominations. A year later, he was one of only four Limerick players to win an All Star.
Last winter,
Morrissey went travelling for three months
with his girlfriend, touring seven countries in South America. He returned a day before Limerick played Cork in the league and in the following couple of months, he struggled to pick up the pace. Against Tipp in the opening round of the championship he scored just once from five shots; against Waterford it was three from five; against Cork, five from six. Do you need a graph to see the pattern?
'Earlier this year, when guys were questioning that maybe he had come back a little late from his travels, I think he nearly thrived on people doubting his credentials,' says Moran. 'I think over the last couple of weeks he's been back to his very, very best. As good as he's ever been.'
With Morrissey and Hegarty everybody knows what's coming. What can you do about it?