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Irish Times
2 days ago
- Sport
- Irish Times
Old foes reunited: Kilkenny's Huw Lawlor aiming to take giant leap towards Liam in clash of titans
Huw Lawlor's debut season for Kilkenny ended in a haze of blue and gold, with strains of Slievenamon bouncing around the stadium and Tipperary leaving Croke Park with the spoils of the season. Tipp were commanding winners of that 2019 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship final, 3-25 to 0-20. In Lawlor's maiden campaign with the Kilkenny seniors, his performances were enough to earn him an All Star nomination. But the All-Ireland decider proved a challenging afternoon for all wearing black and amber, as Séamus Callanan captained Tipp to a 14-point victory in a game shaped by Richie Hogan's sending off before the interval. It remains the last time the counties have met in the championship – but that will change at Croke Park this Sunday when they cross hurls at the semi-final stages (4pm throw-in). READ MORE Between 2009 and 2019, the sides contested six All-Ireland SHC finals, one of which went to a replay. Yet Sunday will actually be Tipp's first time playing at GAA headquarters since the 2019 decider. Lawlor didn't win an All Star that season but the 29-year-old has since picked up two accolades and is now widely regarded as one of the top full backs in the game. 'Obviously it was a tough first year; when you go in as a defender in your first year, you're going to be challenged in different ways,' he recalls. 'But I took huge learnings from that match and every championship match that year. Obviously there's huge history there [between the counties] and there's obviously been massive local excitement.' Asked about the lack of championship meetings between the counties since 2019, he says: 'It's funny the way it works out. They were huge battles in the late 2000s between the counties as two great teams went at it. Those Kilkenny players are heroes of ours so we're just trying to replicate that.' Kilkenny have not won an All-Ireland senior hurling title since 2015 and are currently enduring their joint longest spell without an All-Ireland triumph along with the barren decades between 1922-32 and 1947-57. Kilkenny's Huw Lawlor and Mark Rodgers of Clare during the 2024 All-Ireland semi-final. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho The Cats lost to Clare at the semi-final stage 12 months ago – with the Banner progressing to beat Cork in the decider. Having contested the 2022 and 2023 finals, Kilkenny have lost to the eventual champions in the last three years. 'Obviously it was hugely disappointing to lose that game last year,' says Lawlor. 'We probably put ourselves in a good position and we didn't finish it off. 'But every time you lose it's feeding something inside that drives you on. Losing would probably drive you on a lot more than winning and we're just trying to put that right.' Lawlor was at home two weeks ago watching the Dublin- Limerick quarter-final. Had that game gone to form, then the Cats would have been playing John Kiely's side in a semi-final this weekend. But Lawlor says he was not shocked to see the Dubs deliver such a performance . 'I'm not surprised they did well. Obviously we've played them a number of times over the years, they have some brilliant hurlers so I'm not surprised by the performance and huge credit to them, they really brought it on the day. 'A lot of people might have expected Limerick to win but as I said, we were just focusing on ourselves, we were ready to play whoever came down the track for us. 'That result probably emphasised that there's such fine margins in intercounty hurling. If you're not right or you don't perform in the right way on a certain day, anything can happen.' Kilkenny's Leinster final win over Galway last month secured a sixth consecutive Bob O'Keeffe Cup for the Cats, but landing hurling's biggest prize is the main aim of Derek Lyng's side. Lawlor has been working as a dietitian at St Luke's Hospital in Kilkenny for the last four years but he doesn't take his work with him to the dressingroom. 'No, not at all, we have dietitians and they're brilliant. If there are any questions from the lads, I just tell them they're asking the wrong person. There's clinical dietetics and then there's sports nutrition, which is a different kind of a thing. 'But nutrition is a big part of the game now and you're just trying to nail it and not leave yourself short on game day. 'You could say that about your training and your sleep and your nutrition; if you leave one short you're going to suffer down the line.' Former Kilkenny defender Tommy Walsh has famously talked in the past about his in-season diet, which often included a fry in the morning and a plate of chicken goujons after training. 'I wouldn't be going against Tommy Walsh on it, that's for sure,' smiles Lawlor. 'It didn't do him any harm.' And it's no harm for hurling to have Kilkenny and Tipperary back biting at each other in Croke Park either. *Lawlor was speaking at the launch of the 24th annual Circet All-Ireland GAA Golf Challenge. This year's Challenge, in aid of GAA-related charities, takes place at Killarney Golf and Fishing Resort on October 16th and 17th.
Irish Times
21-06-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
Eamon O'Shea helping Galway see the game in a different way
In their determination to explain Eamon O'Shea, somehow, Tommy Dunne and Darragh Egan both resort to a pass they remember. In both cases it led to a goal in an All-Ireland final, though they could have chosen another pass from a symphony of thousands and it would have meant the same thing. Every creative thought O'Shea had about hurling was expressed with a pass. Lar Corbett's second goal in the 2010 final is seared in Egan's memory. Noel McGrath released Corbett with a reverse hand pass, but the ball McGrath received was fizzed from 50 yards by Gearóid Ryan, like it was carried on a zip-wire. 'It was the Gearóid Ryan pass that we were really working on for three years,' says Egan. 'That goal probably defined Eamon's coaching in the '08, '09, '10 era.' The pass in Dunne's mind was from another All-Ireland against Kilkenny, nine years later. Séamus Callanan won a ball in the corner and flashed a 30-yard pass to John 'Bubbles' O'Dwyer, surging into space at the far post. He stunned the ball with one touch and scored without taking the ball to hand. The leverage for the pass, though, was the angle; without the run, the goal chance would have been strangled. READ MORE O'Shea has always been devoted to angles. In the past he has spoken about his admiration for Michel Bruyninckx, the former Standard Liege academy director, who developed a training method designed to improve the brain's performance. It is Brunyninckx's belief that 80 per cent of performance in sport is in the mind and it has always been O'Shea's goal to nurture thinking players. Hurling and soccer share very little common ground, but Bruyninckx said something in an interview with the BBC once that echoes through O'Shea's coaching life. 'If a team consciously plays the ball at angles at very high speed it will be quite impossible to recover the ball [for the opposition],' Bruyninckx said. 'The team rhythm will be so high that your opponent will never get into the match.' When O'Shea returned for his third stint with the Tipp hurlers in 2019, Cairbre Ó Cairealláin was the strength and conditioning coach. Every training session was a collaborative work, but O'Shea had an executive veto. [ Joe Canning: Everything is coming together for Tipperary at the right time Opens in new window ] 'If Cairbre arrived out with a straight-line warm-up drill it was put in the rubbish bin straight away,' says Dunne. 'It just wouldn't get over the first hurdle. Anything that was in a straight line was not going to work. Movement was such a huge part of the philosophy. The unpredictable nature of how we can attack teams from the goalkeeper out.' Darragh Egan, Liam Sheedy, selector Eamon O'Shea and Tommy Dunne enjoy good times together with Tipperary in 2019. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Egan was on the Tipperary panel when O'Shea was the coach between 2008 and 2010, and he was still part of the squad when O'Shea was the Tipp manager between 2013 and 2015. Tommy Dunne didn't know him before they came together under Liam Sheedy in 2019; Egan was part of the same management team. O'Shea didn't arrive until the spring of that year, and immediately he set his mind to chemistry. 'The thing with Eamon,' says Dunne, 'from a coaching perspective, we had to be philosophically aligned before we could go near doing something productive on the pitch. So we talked and talked and met and met for ages, on a weekly basis, and it was powerful stuff. 'We talked about ideas and attaching names to things. Not so much about game plans, but just 'what if' scenarios and 'if we tried this how would it look?'. It was operating on a blank canvas with a huge amount of imagination and creativity thrown into the mix, where nothing was off the table. No sort of bizarre idea would be completely ruled out until it was discussed in savage detail. The pitch was the beautiful part of it, but the other part was just as exhilarating for me as a coach.' The first thing you feel after an Eamon O'Shea session is that you haven't trained at all — Fergal Moore, former Galway captain Since the beginning of last season, the Galway hurlers have been exposed to O'Shea's fertile mind. When Henry Shefflin stood down as manager at the end of last summer and Micheál Donoghue stepped in, he was bound to approach O'Shea to carry on. Nobody expected O'Shea to balk at the opportunity. Henry Shefflin and Eamon O'Shea with Galway last year. Photograph: Ben Brady/Inpho Their relationship stretches back many years. When Donoghue coached his own club, Clarinbridge, to win the club All-Ireland in 2011 he invited O'Shea to take occasional training sessions; when Donoghue moved on to Turloughmore, the arrangement continued. When O'Shea took the Tipperary manager's job, the favour flowed the other way. At the beginning of O'Shea's second season Donoghue was introduced to the Tipp set-up, inconspicuously and without any formal role. He travelled with O'Shea from Galway and blended into the scene. 'After 2013 [a season that had gone badly] Eamon may have felt 'I need an outside set of eyes,' and Micheál is a very, very sound fella,' says Egan. 'On the field he had very minimal impact. I distinctly remember him taking one drill one time in front of the Old Stand in Thurles, but other than that it was more of a sounding board for Eamon.' By the time Donoghue took the Galway job for the first time in 2016, O'Shea had stood down as Tipp manager and in the years that followed the Galway players were convinced that Donoghue had tried to pull him on board. O'Shea was a professor in University of Galway 's school of business and economics and Galway had been his adopted home for decades. From the stand in Pearse Stadium you can see his house up on the hill. But the extent of his involvement was one-on-one sessions with players at Donoghue's request. Joe Canning met him once in Pearse Stadium. The gates were locked, and O'Shea worked through some principles of movement and a few observations on free taking. He told Canning to pay attention to the sound of the strike. Over the years, O'Shea was a generous teacher in those clinics. Egan was a student for four years in Galway and he used to meet him for lunchtime sessions in the ball alley in Salthill. But O'Shea comes alive when the field is full of hurlers and there is no sheet music, only his baton. 'The first thing you feel after an Eamon O'Shea session is that you haven't trained at all,' says Fergal Moore, the former Galway captain, who trained under O'Shea in Turloughmore. Joe Canning and Fergal Moore with Galway in 2014. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho 'You're concentrating so much and you're lapping up every word and the stuff he does is so different that before you know it, the session is over. Even the way he talks is totally different. He sees the game in a different way. It's such a complex way in his head, but he's such a brilliant communicator it comes out very simply. It's totally stimulating and totally refreshing.' For O'Shea's sessions there isn't a training cone on the field. Egan and Dunne refer to 'drills' but they both know it's the wrong word. He doesn't coach by prescription; nothing is explained on a tactics board. He has spoken about his players taking as much pleasure in the scoring pass as in the score itself; the phrase he uses is 'spinning the ball around'. Every pass is a 'connection'. In a 2010 interview with the online hurling magazine Sliotar, O'Shea tried to explain the abstractness of what he does and how it feels. 'This goes deeper,' he said. 'This is to the soul, if it exists. It's deeper than simply the physical aspect. This has to flow. You need to feel the confidence, the self-assuredness running through you. Then that takes over.' For his coaching to work, though, players must be convinced and invested, and they must be capable. In 2010 Tipperary were the first All-Ireland winning team to put an emphasis on stick-passing, over short and middle distances. That skill had always been present in the game, but it was largely uncultivated. It is the dominant means of transferring the ball at all levels now, but that wasn't the case 15 years ago. O'Shea ignited that revolution. Eamon O'Shea with John O'Dwyer with Tipperary in 2014. Photograph: Cathal Noonan/Inpho In Tipp, he had the players to animate his vision. 'Awareness and the ability to use space, that's a huge part of what he does,' says Dunne. 'It's very hard to coach that but he was always true to that. He's very, very attack minded. He would always have been of the view, 'We're Tipperary, we attack and we just go for it'. 'I think he appeared at the right time for us. The players were perfect for him. For Noel McGrath, Larry Corbett, Eoin Kelly, Jason Forde, Seamus Callanan, Bubbles O'Dwyer, Brendan Maher, Bonner – they got this kind of stuff. They got it. [ Galway's Fintan Burke bullish in advance of championship quarter-final against Tipp Opens in new window ] 'It didn't have to be perfect at training. It wasn't perfect every night. There was a lot of chaos. Tons of chaos. Tons of mistakes. There were probably players wondering, 'I f**king don't know what's going on here.' I wouldn't have been surprised. But I got it, and they got it. Enough of it happened in big games to know that it was right for us.' What about the Galway players? Have they got it yet? Do they have the right players for his approach? Has O'Shea's influence been visible in Galway's play over the 18 months? The suggestion is that Shefflin and O'Shea may not have been on the same page last season. That won't be the case with Donoghue, or with Franny Forde, Donoghue's closest ally over the years and part of the Galway management team again. Forde played under O'Shea in NUIG and Turloughmore. Their relationship has deep roots too. But trying to work out which components of Galway's play are down to O'Shea's input so far is like trying to separate the milk from your tea. Galway manager Micheál Donoghue. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho 'As regards Eamon's stamp being all over it [Galway's play], probably not,' says Egan. 'But Micheál, Franny, Noel Larkin and Aidan Harte, they're all modern thinkers in their own right. I'd say as a collective the five of them are trying to find a pattern that suits the players they have. At the moment, Galway are really trying to attack from deep. It's unfair to say that's Eamon. 'But he's constantly evolving with the times, constantly learning how he can approach different players. He's always thinking about different types of approaches. Two centre forwards around the centre back was something that Eamon brought to the table with us. It was executed brilliantly against Limerick in 2021 [Munster final] but we couldn't finish the job.' O'Shea retired from NUIG about 18 months ago, but before he finished he did a tour of duty in Australia. One day, a few weeks before Christmas, Egan got a text from O'Shea: he was at the Gabba, watching a cricket team going through their paces. 'He was talking about technique, and what their footwork is like and how they approach the ball.' O'Shea's mind was never full. There was always room.
