In Limerick, the sermons have changed but the hunger for silverware remains undimmed.
Two days out from another Munster decider and John Kiely’s side are targeting an extraordinary seven in-a-row. This in a county that had won just one provincial title in the 20 years prior to his taking over as senior manager.
The vengeful demolition of Cork in their penultimate round robin game underlined that they had put the disappointment at missing out on a fifth Liam MacCarthy in a row to bed.
While missing out on history stung at the time, there is an upside in that the chit-chat around the city has at least seen some variation.
“Setting the disappointment aside – which was a huge disappointment – the narrative has changed,” Kiely tells RTÉ Sport.
“(In 2024) the first words out of everybody’s mouth that you’d meet when you’d go to the shop or go to the post office or go to Mass (were about the five-in-a-row).
“It was almost the first line at Mass, you know. We’ll pray for the five in a row and we’ll move on to the more important matters of life and death.
“So, it’s definitely no harm that it’s finished with. It would have been lovely to do it, of course it would, but such is sport.
“We’ve really enjoyed our season, so far. We struggled at times during the spring. There are disappointing moments, there are hurtful moments. But you have to embrace the hurt, you have to embrace the disappointment and you have to try and make yourself better.
“Definitely, 2024 is most certainly in the rear-view mirror.”
The five-in-a-row mania was swiftly replaced in some quarters by a different narrative, namely that the sun was setting on Limerick’s golden era.
This idea gathered strength after a relatively humdrum league campaign, during which the Cork hype train fired into overdrive.
While many scoffed, foreseeing a bounce-back similar to Kilkenny in 2011, Kiely was conscious of the idea floating around that his team had seen its best days.
“Maybe that narrative is out there. Or was out there,” Kiely says curtly.
“And I think that narrative (pause)… has been debunked now.”
While the 16-point win over the league champions has formed the centre-piece of the current campaign, Kiely is quick to extol the opening day performance against Tipperary, which he feels was under-valued by observers who weren’t alive to the home side’s improvement in the past 12 months.
“I think the performance of both teams was actually under-appreciated on the day and in the week after the game. I think people had written off Tipperary in advance of that fixture.
“They didn’t expect them to be able to get a result and they didn’t expect them to be able to produce a performance like they did. We weren’t surprised by that performance that they put in.
“We put up a really, really good performance as well. We should have won that game by a couple of points, possibly.
“We’ve been building steadily since that game. We got a good performance in Waterford. It was an incremental improvement from the Tipperary game.
“Again, our third match against Cork we saw another incremental improvement in our performance levels.”
“It was almost the first line at Mass, you know. We’ll pray for the five in a row and we’ll move on to the more important matters of life and death.”
Last weekend’s loss to an already eliminated Clare in the final round robin game was widely dismissed as an irrelevance, with Limerick bound for a Munster final and in experimental mode.
However, Kiely was critical of his team’s shooting efficiency on the day and admitted that he found the atmosphere “weird”.
“The public just found it difficult to engage in the game here anyway, definitely for sure. You could hear people talking up in the stand.
“Normally you can’t hear your ears, let alone hear somebody talking up in the stand. It was very unusual.
“I just didn’t want it to creep onto the pitch, that lack of engagement. It was a little bit frustrating at the time.”
Kiely has now been manager for nearly a quarter of Limerick’s Munster championship victories – it will surpass a quarter if they win this weekend.
It all seemed rather far-fetched after his first year in charge, which was viewed as unpromisingly abject at the time. Limerick exited the championship at the earliest possible juncture, after drab losses to Clare and Kilkenny.
From the current remove, the long-forgotten 2017 campaign feels jarringly at odds with the rest of his tenure, which has been an almost unbroken line of success.
While Kiely stresses that improvement was visible behind the scenes that summer, he admits he didn’t foresee this tsunami of success coming.
“All I saw coming at the end of ’17 was a phone call to say ‘thanks very much!'” he laughs.
“I spent four months waiting for the call. I’m glad my phone wasn’t working! Or somebody (in the county board) had the wrong number.
“We knew we had made improvements, of course we did. The impact of the coaching had definitely begun to embed.
“On reflection now, you’d have to say to get a team to a level of performance takes time. For people to get to know each other. To understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. To embed principles into your coaching and your play. It takes time.”
The green shoots first became visible in the humble environs of the 2018 Munster League and then in Division 1B of the league, when things really started to click.
“We won the Munster League actually. Paul Brown was captain at the time,” recalls Kiely. “I can still remember him lifting that cup. And that was in itself a seminal moment.
“The Munster League actually was good to us back in those days. We would have done well in it and put a good lot of emphasis on it. It suited us at that time.
“We had a league match against Offaly above in Offaly. And we won that. But we won it where we were improving in the final third of the game. We looked to have found real confidence. We were imposing ourselves on the game, we were physically dominant. We were scoring at a quicker rate. There was a bit of flow coming to what we were doing.
“Then we played Galway in Galway. We had a poor first half, we went in nine or ten points down. We made a decision at half-time that was probably very important on that occasion. We didn’t make any changes. We trusted the players to get out there and turn this thing around. They took a lot of confidence from us making that decision. It showed that we trusted them.
“In ’18, they were the turning point. Those three combined moments. And from there, we just pushed on.”
Eight years on, Munster medals are now ten-a-penny in Limerick. Doomed nearly men in the 1990s, forgotten also-rans for most of the 2000s, Limerick have been transformed into consummate winners in the 2020s. The new masters of the sport.
As they continue to rack up titles, Kiely is quick to remind his players of lean times in the past, when fatalism was the default mood around Limerick hurling.
“In 2013, the previous Munster title was 1996. I keep reminding the boys of the long periods of time that Limerick experienced without a Munster title. Maybe even a Munster final appearance. They’re very much attuned to that.
“To be so consistent in a world of competition that the Munster championship is, it’s a remarkable achievement, what they’ve done.
“We’ve gotten lucky. In 2023, we got lucky, Waterford beat Tipperary and it meant we qualified for the Munster final.
“But if you work hard, you make your own luck. And our lads have worked extremely hard.”
Saturday’s decider will be the third of the current run to be played in the Gaelic Grounds. Limerick and Cork are still operating by the home and away arrangement for Munster finals which pre-dates the current round robin structure.
The most recent provincial decider under this arrangement was back in 2014, when Jimmy Barry Murphy’s Cork side regained the Munster title in the last game played at the old Páirc Ui Chaoimh.
Kiely’s earliest memory of a Munster final in Limerick back in the early 1980s is a fairly hair-raising one
“I was with my father and we went to leave down in the right hand corner by the Mackey Stand,” he recalls. “I’ll tell you, it was as close to a crush as I’d ever experienced in my life. It was an awful experience. Everybody tried to leave at the same time.”
The two most recent Munster finals at the venue have been rather more celebratory affairs. In 2019, they blew past Tipperary to claim the first Munster title of the current run.
In 2023, they squeezed past Clare by a single point, the narrowest victory of the lot, which was briefly held up by a premature pitch invasion. Of all the provincial titles they’ve won, the atmosphere and colour that day really sticks in the mind for the Limerick manager.
“When you’re in the bus coming up the road and you see the mix of colour,” Kiely says. “The one in 2023 in particular with Clare. Outside the Greenhills Hotel, there was five or six thousand Clare supporters and we drove up through them. It would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
“It was an incredible moment. And you looked up the road, and there was about 10,000 Limerick supporters.
“In any other society, war would have broken out. But thankfully in the GAA, it’s a shared celebration of a really special sporting event, that people far and wide, from Ulster, Connacht and Leinster, want to come and enjoy. Long may that be the case.”
