Limerick's meetings with Kilkenny have largely defined John Kiely’s reign - but the widely forgotten 2017 qualifier tie between them almost consigned him to the scrap heap.
The 2018 All-Ireland quarter-final was the game that propelled Limerick to that year’s title more than any other, while their shock semi-final defeat the following year is the backdrop to a 15-game unbeaten run in Championship hurling as they’ve hoovered up three Munster titles and a pair of All-Irelands ahead of Sunday’s three-in-a-row bid.
But there was little about Kiely’s first season at the helm to suggest that such unprecedented success was about to follow.
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Yet again they failed to emerge from Division 1B, finishing third behind Wexford and Galway, thereby condemning them to an eighth successive season outside the top flight.
In the Munster semi-final at a more than half-empty Semple Stadium, Clare beat them by four points and their season ended at the earliest possible juncture when Kilkenny scored a 0-20 to 0-17 victory in the qualifiers at Nowlan Park.
Kiely didn’t spare himself as he critiqued an underwhelming season.
“’17 was very difficult – very, very difficult,” he admits. “But I suppose the first year you get involved is always going to be the toughest year, trying to put your stamp on things.
“You’re learning on the job as you’re going, if you like. You just don’t know what it’s like until you’re in it.
“Yeah, I had a lot of issues that I needed to fix myself at the end of ’17 – things that I hadn’t maybe put in place in quite the right way.
“You learn about the people that you’ve got with you, helping you to do it, and you figure out their skillset. You can go back and say, ‘Right, how can I get more out of each person that’s involved?’ in terms of working with the group, and the group itself obviously evolved as well over time.
“Yeah, you know, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to me had I got a phone call at the end of ’17 to say, ‘Listen, thanks very much, you’ve done a great job, you’ve done the best you can, but we’re moving on’.
“But thankfully they kept trust in us, and gave us a chance to keep going and see what we could do with the group. Like, I’m very glad of having had that opportunity.”
Getting the county board’s backing to carry on was one thing. But the most critical endorsement was the one that Kiely was prepared to give to himself.
“There was nights when I was pacing the yard out the back, wondering, ‘Am I the right man for this job? Have I got the capacity to deliver what I would expect from myself in terms of the quality and the standards that were required, and the success that’s required?’
“And losing two Championship matches in two in ’17 – that wasn’t tenable for me.
“So, losing any more Championship matches after that was simply not tenable. If I did, I was gone. Not by anybody else’s volition but my own.”
Anecdotal reports from the Limerick camp tell you that Kilkenny is the opposition that they’ve been gunning for after being outfought by them in that 2019 semi-final but, unsurprisingly, Kiely doesn’t indulge that line of thought.
Having faced off against Kilkenny in knockout Championship games in each of his first three seasons, they haven’t even met in the League over the past three years and so he contends that the relevance of their past meetings is diminished with regard to Sunday’s final.
“Listen, you can go back and you can look at those games and obviously they were huge. The one in the quarter-final in ‘18 was a very important milestone at that stage for us. It was a fantastic performance by our boys.
“Those are irrelevant really coming into the next day. They’re so far back. Manpower has changed, management have changed, the game has moved on. Everything has evolved.
“I’m sure it’s the same on the Kilkenny side. A lot of their players have moved on. Different people are coaching the team, playing on the team.
“We have 14 players from the 2018 panel who are no longer playing with us so there’s a huge change, nearly half the group gone already so it’s of no consequence really.”
However, not having a more recent read on Kilkenny doesn’t make their preparations for Sunday any more taxing, he insists.
“Not at all. Our focus will be 95% on ourselves, if you like, in terms of what we want to do on the day, in terms of what way we want to play. The performance that we want to bring. That’s always been the case for us.
“We will obviously take into account the opposition and we will be planning for how we’re going to manage certain aspects of what they’re going to bring to the table.
“Ultimately it’ll be 95% about ourselves and the performance we can bring because if we don’t get that right it’s irrelevant what we do about the rest.”
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