Along with those of the 17,000 crowd who paid €25 to get in, the Allianz insurance group will probably feel they should get their money back in the wake of the non-event of a National Hurling League final at Limerick.

Right from the beginning, there was something unreal about the occasion. The Division 2 final was dreadfully one-sided. When the Waterford team came on the pitch prematurely, while the Man-of-the-Match award was being presented to Down’s Paul Braniff, there was a faint cheer. When they hit the pitch in the corresponding fixture six years ago, there was an outburst of emotion from the packed stands in Thurles.

The anachronistic pre-match parade is traditionally supposed to fire up the supporters and, no doubt, the players themselves. But this parade was so slow that the players kept bumping into each other like the Keystone Cops. The band was playing “When the Saints go Marching In”, but clearly the march they had in mind was the Dead March. And, to keep this theme going, Amhrán na bhFiann was delivered in whispered tones like a funeral dirge.

When Waterford played Cork in the league final in 1998, there were 35,000 people present. Waterford put in a big effort, but lost out. A week later, they nearly came a cropper against Kerry – only a super second half show by one Dan Shanahan kept them afloat. The fans stayed away yesterday, but will be back in force in Thurles next Sunday. They have shown clearly where their priorities lie. Would it be any wonder if the Waterford players felt the same?

In An Moltóir’s view, Tony Considine got it exactly right in the Examiner. He said the Waterford body language betrayed their attitude on the day, which was to treat the occasion as a training spin. According to Considine, you have to be prepared to put your body on the line in order to win a final. For An Moltóir, this was the simplest test: not one Waterford player was treated for injury during the entire game. Galway, by contrast, had the magic bottle men on the pitch regularly over the seventy minutes.

The other obvious indicator of Waterford’s lack of focus was the litany of basic errors which they committed. An Moltóir counted twenty-six fumbles in all (dropped balls, failures to control or lift balls) shared by twelve Waterford players. Of Galway’s final total of 2-15, 2-5 came directly from Waterford mistakes. And, of course, if you are not able to close Galway down, they have the close skills to punish you. And to give Galway their due, they were well up for this game, were first to the ball most of the time, and harassed Waterford players in possession from start to finish.

Yet, if Considine’s view is correct, why did Waterford go to such efforts to get to the final in the first place? One possible answer to this is that it was a case of Waterford ending up in the final rather than setting out to get there. The games against Kilkenny, Cork and Tipperary were the sort of challenges that any team would be up for, and Waterford showed considerable grit and commitment to survive those challenges. They got a dream start against Dublin which ended the game after ten minutes, they had too much hurling for Laois, and Limerick allowed them to dominate the first half of that particular match, before nearly getting back on terms before the end. Perhaps the clearest indicator of Waterford’s approach to the league was their game against Clare, where again they pulled a lot of punches but without allowing the Banner men to dominate like Galway were allowed to do yesterday.

And yet, despite all their dominance, Galway could easily have allowed yesterday’s game to slip from their grasp, had Waterford taken even one third of the sixteen wides they hit, some of which were very bad indeed. In fact, it is possible that, had Paul O’Brien started this game instead of Paul Flynn, there would have been a different result. Not only was Flynn completely out of sorts with his freetaking, but he allowed Damien Joyce to repeatedly get out in front of him and make rousing clearances down the field. Flynn hit two simple frees wide in the first half and when looking for goals from close-in frees in the second half, he sent one wide and one over the bar, and had two blocked. If Flynn was really clued in, he would have got at least 1-2 from these efforts, which was the gap between the teams at the end.

Yesterday revealed a new brand of hurling from Galway, much more direct than the “Jennet Express” style which has been their undoing down through the years. The three players who best applied the Hayes doctrine of keeping it moving were Fergal Healy, Alan Kerins and, above all, David Forde. While Joyce and Canning were doing the spectacular stuff at the back which saw them vying for the Man-of-the-Match award, Forde was the real hero in the way he disrupted the Waterford halfbacks and kept the ball moving into the inside forwards. In all, Forde played the ball eighteen times during the game, divided equally between the two halves. Only two other players came near Forde’s strike rate, one being the aforementioned Healy, with sixteen. The other, perhaps surprisingly, was Ken McGrath, with seventeen plays. However, the Waterford captain mixed this with some terrible blunders which undermined his overall performance.

Some aspects of the Waterford sideline decision-making was puzzling. Experimenting with Eoin McGrath as a corner back in a league final was perhaps indicative of the mentors’ overall attitude to the game. It was amazing that Ken McGrath was never switched with Tony Browne, whose fumble rate equalled his strike rate. Perhaps they did not wish to give too much away in advance of next Sunday’s clash with Clare. The most peculiar decision of all was to move Michael Walsh from midfield, where he had a very influential first half – the only Waterford player to play more ball than him in that half was his midfield comrade Dave Bennett. But, where Bennett’s opposite number hit even more ball, Walsh’s marker Tony Óg Regan was almost completely anonymous. Not only did Walsh disappear from the game at wing forward with Derek Hardiman emerging as a dominant force after the change of ends, but his midfield replacement, Eoin Kelly, was also much less effective following the switch. Perhaps Justin McCarthy has been watching too many Chelsea games on the box over the last twelve months.

Two concluding general observations. The GAA will surely have to review the place of the National Hurling League in its competitive structure, if only to maintain the interest of potential sponsors. Playing the final so close to the championship has undermined its credibility. Perhaps it is time to offer a prize of a holiday with plenty of spending money to the winners. Or maybe the league should be scrapped altogether. An Moltóir has proposed the idea before of playing the provincial championships off on a league basis instead of the National League, with a national “league” final between the Leinster and Munster champions, both of whom would get preferential status in an open-draw All-Ireland championship which would commence following the completion of the provincial championships.

And finally…the GAA in recent years have been making big noises about the “presentation of games” and regularly penalise county boards for violations of what appear to be petty and silly regulations. Yet the same GAA repeatedly allows big hurling games to be held up because of the unavailability of a sliotar – as happened at least twice in Limerick on Sunday. It has never ceased to amaze An Moltoir that the GAA can happily take a million euros in attendance receipts at big games, and yet can’t manage to make a bag of sliotars available in each goal to facilitate continuity of play. Should they not fine themselves for such incompetence? Or is the “presentation of games” really only a smokescreen for allowing Croke Park to show who