Fair dues to Limerick and Cork for getting the “real” All-Ireland hurling championship off to an epic start on Sunday. Basking in the afterglow of their magnificent victory, I imagine many Limerick players and supporters will be taking particular pleasure in having cocked a snook at Babs Keating. Babs had forecast a hiding for the Shannonsiders in his Sunday Times column which contained smugness and insight in inverse proportions. I’m sure that Galway, Waterford, Offaly and Wexford will be equally delighted at Babs’s authoritative dismissal of their championship prospects.

It is now conventional wisdom that the best time to beat Cork is in the first round of the championship. It is equally axiomatic to state that, if you allow Cork to play hurling, they will destroy you. So Limerick adopted the same approach as their under 21s in last year’s All-Ireland final against a more talented Galway outfit: they made sure they got to the ball first and, if they didn’t, they made sure that every Cork ball was either blocked or delivered under pressure.

Limerick’s feverish approach was always likely to produce a fair quota of wides, and when Cork finally caught up with them in the second half, it looked like being the same old story of another wasted opportunity. Cork’s failure to put the Shannonsiders away was only due in part to Limerick’s undying fighting spirit. More important were the Rebels’ own inadequacies. This in fact is a very mediocre Cork team which won Munster and All-Ireland titles in the last two years through a combination of fitness, good luck, dodgy refereeing, and the sheer confidence associated with wearing the “blood and bandages”.

Cork showed on Sunday that amazingly for a county with such a large playing pool they have no strength in depth. They were in hard luck in losing both Corcoran and Ó hAilpín, whose replacements were simply not up to it. As a result, their halfback line was unable to provide a platform for supplying the kind of ball the forwards need. And, as Offaly showed last year, when you cut off the supply lines to McGrath and Deane, Cork have little else to offer. They have no players such as Pat Fox or Joe McKenna who can dig you out of a hole with limited possession. And when you saw the usual succession of mediocre substitutes (Kevin Murray, Neil Ronan) coming on the field, you knew that Cork were in serious trouble. Meanwhile, with the Limerick wingbacks in total control, the much-vaunted Cork defence was finally stretched to breaking point.

The next question is: can Limerick repeat the performance against Waterford? An Moltóir reckons that they will have to, on the grounds that, man for man, the Déise have better hurlers. It will be difficult for Eamon Cregan to lift his charges to the same heights again, particularly since their opposition do not count as one of the giants of the game. For Waterford’s part, Gerald McCarthy probably regrets missing the opportunity of having a go against his home county especially with a managerial vacancy by the Lee a likely outcome of a defeat for Cork if that game had materialised. McCarthy may find it that bit more difficult to motivate his team for the clash with Limerick.

At the same time, there is no doubt that Waterford have had a psychological problem with the red jerseys in all grades of hurling down through the years. Limerick have no such problem, as most of their team last Sunday have had the pleasure of handing out a severe beating to the rebels in championship hurling the older players in Páirc Uí Chaoimh in 1996 and the younger players in the replay of last year’s Munster under 21 final. Indeed, the experience gained by those players in surviving the drawn game also played in the Park in that final undoubtedly stood to them during the spine-tingling closing minutes last Sunday.

Finally, a few words about the inept timekeeping in last Sunday’s game. An Moltóir assumes that it is their begrudging acceptance of change which causes the GAA to make a hames of virtually every innovation they introduce to their games. Thus we had the fiasco which attended the initial introduction of the card system a few years ago; then the messy arrangements for controlling substitutions brought in this year; and now we have the problem with added time allowances. An Moltóir assumes that the simple rule should be that the clock is stopped whenever there is any stoppage to the regular flow of play. In the first half in Cork last Sunday, there were stoppages for injuries to O’Brien and Butler, the issuing of yellow cards to Begley, Sherlock and O’Brien, a bust-up in the Limerick goalmouth, and the substitution of Ronan for Jerry O’Connor. In the second half, there were yellow cards for Murray, McDonagh and Ronan, three substitutions and two further schemozzles. Yet no allowance was made for any of these hold-ups.

It is possibly ironic that Cork, who benefited so much from favourable refereeing decisions in 1999, may have been the victims of such a quirky approach to monitoring lost time on the part of Pat Horan who otherwise did an excellent job last Sunday. But in the long run the GAA is going to have to streamline this very contentious element of the organisation of games through the adoption of sensible guidelines and appropriate training of referees. And, rather than the laborious electronic message board borrowed from soccer, why can’t the very simple and effective time clock used in Croke Park by the ladies footballers be adopted by their male counterparts? Surely the fact that the women thought of it first should not be a problem...