First of all, congratulations to all four teams who contributed to last Sunday’s hurling fest in Croke Park.

It certainly was up there among the best All-Ireland final days in this writer’s memory. A good index of the standard of the senior game is the quality points system for individual plays used by this column. The total number of quality points, at 756, was 30 above the average number of quality points for the previous ten games covered in this year’s hurling championship. Perhaps even more significant was the number of plays given four (excellent) or five (superb) points – a total of 36 compared with an average of 19 for the previous ten games.

One must give great credit to Liam Sheedy and the Tipperary team for producing what was by far their best performance over the last two years, in terms of consistency of endeavour both throughout the team and from start to finish. They played more ball than Kilkenny in both halves (91/83 in the first and 74/66 in the second). Their quality points total was also well ahead of the Cats (387/369). Seven of their players scored 30 or more quality points, compared with just two for Kilkenny. Never has a team which produced so many good individual performances lost an All-Ireland final.

Other statistics from the game leave you wondering even more how Tipp managed to lose this game. Of the 26 Kilkenny puckouts which were clearly won, the Premier County team won no less than 19. More remarkable still, they won 17 of their own 25 clearly-won puckouts – an extraordinary proportion at this level of hurling – thanks mainly to Brendan Cummins’s short or well-directed pucks.

So, with all this possession, how did Tipperary not prevail in the end? There are a number of possible explanatory factors which this column has identified. We will never know how the game would have panned out if Benny Dunne hadn’t been sent off in the 54th minute. However, it may be noted that at the time Tipperary were one point ahead, and six minutes later they were three points in front, so the sending off had no immediate impact on the general trend of the game, which was all in Tipperary’s favour at that stage.

Diarmuid Kirwan’s erroneous awarding of the penalty to Kilkenny in the 63rd minute (Richie Power was on his ninth step when he was fouled inside the large square) had a much clearer impact on the game’s outcome, although in itself it was not necessarily decisive. What was decisive was Kirwan’s failure to penalise Richie Power for a blatant push which took Paul Curran out of the play in the lead-up to Kilkenny’s second goal just two minutes later.

There has been much media comment on Kirwan’s refereeing performance last Sunday, with some punters arguing that, overall, he had a good game. This column would not agree. We counted 15 incidents where Kirwan should have awarded a free and didn’t (or shouldn’t have awarded a free and did). More crucially, while four of these errors favoured Tipperary, no less than eleven favoured Kilkenny. In addition to those already mentioned, these included Jackie Tyrrell’s frontal tackle on Seamus Callinan in the third minute, which amazingly wasn’t penalised, a trip on Lar Corbett as he careered through the Kilkenny defence in the 12th minute, Eddie Brennan’s elbow/shoulder into Shane McGrath’s face in the 20th minute, Jackie Tyrrell’s “tackle” with his rear end on Seamus Callinan as he also was flying through the Cats’ defence in the 32nd minute, and Michael Rice’s shoulder into the back of Pat Kerwick’s head/neck in the 39th minute.
We reckon that if Kirwan had got all his erroneous calls right, it would have meant a net advantage to Tipperary of up to nine points (given the accuracy of both freetakers). This assumes that Kilkenny’s second goal would have been ruled out and that they would have been awarded a 20-metre free instead of the penalty. While referees are not perfect, one might expect errors to balance out between both sides. This was not the case last Sunday, to Tipperary’s cost.

Tipperary were also disproportionately affected by the “slippage” factor arising from the state of the Croke Park pitch. We counted 15 cases of players slipping during the course of the game, and 12 of these involved Tipperary players. Two of these were particularly damaging – Eoin Kelly’s slip as he shot for goal early in the second half and Conor O’Mahony’s slip which allowed Martin Comerford gain possession in the lead-up to the penalty which gave Kilkenny their breakthrough goal.

Despite all these misfortunes, Tipperary still should have been able to win this game, given all the possession that they had and the scoring chances they created. However, they frequently made poor use of the possession they had. They have too many players whose first instinct is to pass or run with the ball rather than let it in, and when they did let it in, on numerous occasions the ball was underplayed and went straight to an unmarked Kilkenny defender.

Even then, Tipperary created enough scoring chances to have won the game comfortably, but missed far too many of them. In the first half, both teams failed with four scoring attempts. After the change of ends, Tipperary missed eleven scoring chances to just three for Kilkenny (two of which came in the closing minutes when the result had been decided). We reckon that eight of Tipp’s 15 missed chances were bad misses compared with just two of Kilkenny’s seven misses.

Not only were Kilkenny much more economical with their shooting, they were also more resourceful. No less than eleven players (including two defenders and three substitutes) contributed to their total score, compared with just five for Tipperary. Given the dominance of the Tipperary defence, a key contributor to the Cats’ victory was their ability to score from out the field: seven of their points came from outside 65 metres, compared with just one for Tipperary. One might suggest that Tipperary have too many runners and not enough strikers.

The final nail in Tipperary’s coffin was the respective quality of the two teams’ substitutes. With John O’Brien having a nightmare game for Tipp, one found oneself looking through their list of substitutes and seeing no obvious replacement. Benny Dunne was the default option, but hardly optimal given the tightness of the exchanges and the physicality of the Kilkenny defence. The late introductions of Mícheál Webster and Willie Ryan were borne out of desperation more than anything else. By contrast, all three Kilkenny substitutes contributed to the score board and in general play, Martin Comerford in particular setting up one goal and scoring the other. The clinical way in which he finished his own goal contrasted with Seamus Callinan’s blaster which PJ Ryan saved. This was the kind of difference which eventually determined the outcome of this game.

In terms of individual performances, Tommy Walsh was far and away the best player on the pitch and should have walked the man-of-the-match award. He played the ball 19 times, mostly to very good effect, for an overall quality points total of 51 (based on a quality rating ranging from 1-5). Michael Rice actually had more plays (20) but his quality total only came to 40, reflecting the kind of he game plays, getting possession and moving the ball forward without frills. In fact, Rice was Kilkenny’s player of the year, being highly effective and consistent in all his games, for an overall average quality points total of 45.3 from four games, well ahead of Tommy Walsh (whose contribution was modest against both Galway and Waterford) in second place on 34.3. No other Kilkenny player topped 30 points last Sunday, the other leading contributors being John Tennyson (29 points from 12 plays) and Eoin Larkin (28/13).

Tipperary’s top performer, unsurprisingly, was Lar Corbett, with 44 points from 16 plays (exactly the same number of plays and points as he obt