Outstanding Gearóid Hegarty channels Henry ShefflinIt would be a great quiz question if anybody knew the answer. Who was the last forward to win player of the match without scoring, or without even having a shot at the target? Gearóid Hegarty is the answer now but, is there any chance that he’s the first?By half-time in yesterday’s All-Ireland semi-final, Hegarty’s candidacy for the award would have been the last thing on anybody’s mind. The Limerick wing forward had been bundled into touch twice and was struggling to cope with the claustrophobic attentions of Conor Cleary, a risky matchup that was paying out massive dividends for Clare.He had been fouled for one first-half free converted by Aidan O’Connor, but otherwise Hegarty had been peripheral. All of that changed after the break. Cleary was booked five minutes into the second half and Hegarty was fouled for three converted frees in the space of four minutes.Clare couldn’t take a chance on Cleary picking up a second yellow and he was replaced 10 minutes into the second half. After the veteran Clare defender left the field, Hegarty’s influence continued to grow. Nickie Quaid’s kept landing puckout targets in his air space and one of his towering catches led to directly to a point for Peter Casey.Every one of Limerick’s starting forwards scored from play, though, except Hegarty. It brought to mind a performance that Henry Shefflin gave for Kilkenny in an All-Ireland quarter-final against Galway, 19 years ago. Shefflin landed eight frees but in a performance of all-court leadership he had failed to score from play. To Cody, that was immaterial.“I haven’t seen better,” said Cody about Shefflin after that match. “There couldn’t be a better player. It couldn’t be possible.”In the second half yesterday, Hegarty channelled the spirt of that Shefflin performance. Denis WalshParallels between Galway and Tipperary’s All-Ireland runsOn a rotten Saturday night back in January, Galway travelled to Thurles for the first game of the league and though they came up short against Tipperary, they pushed the All-Ireland champions all the way. It was a really promising display, notable for the fact that Micheál Donoghue started only two survivors from the same fixture a year previously, when a young Tipperary team had laid down a similarly promising marker against Galway in Salthill.The parallels between Tipp in 2025 and Galway in 2026 have held strong ever since. Liam Cahill came into last year under pressure, with nobody outside his county (and, in all honesty, probably even fewer inside it) predicting an All-Ireland run. Donoghue’s Galway were thoroughly unfancied at the start of this year too but his courage in bringing about a complete overhaul of the panel has reaped dividends.For Darragh McCarthy, Sam O’Farrell, Oisin O’Donoghue et al last year, see the infusion of youth brought by Jason Rabbitte, Aaron Niland, Cillian Trayers and the rest this time around. The league was good to both teams, just as they were to it. Tipp made the league final in 2025, whereas Galway’s annihilation of Kilkenny in March was a sign that Donoghue’s changes were working.Both wobbled in the early part of the championship, Tipp getting rinsed in Páirc Uí Choimh, Galway coughing up a home defeat to Dublin. But once things got to Croke Park, they righted the ship, Tipp beating Kilkenny in an epic to reach the All-Ireland final, Galway likewise accounting for Cork on a day that shook the old place to its foundations.One last step remains. Nobody fancies them in the final. Didn’t stop Tipp last year, did it? Malachy ClerkinCork’s reset will be painful and time-consumingThe hot consensus now is that Cork must start again, much like Galway did at the end of last season and build a different team. That presupposes the existence of raw material. Do Cork have 10 other players who were better than the ones who were part of the match day squad on Saturday? No. Five? Probably not.The problem for Cork now is that their best players have suffered so many big-game defeats at this stage that you wonder now if those wounds will ever heal. Robert Downey, for example, has lost All-Ireland finals at minor and under-20 level as well as three senior finals.Mark Coleman, Darragh Fitzgibbon, Niall O’Leary and Tim O’Mahony didn’t lose a minor All-Ireland, but they’ve been beaten in three senior finals and an under-21 final. Patrick Collins and Seán O’Donoghue have lost three senior finals. That is a massive accumulation of big game setbacks.Under Pat Ryan and then Ben O’Connor, Cork had a golden run in the under-21/20 grade, winning three titles in four years at the start of the decade. But the flesh has been picked from those teams now. Eleven of Cork’s starters on Saturday have played in at least one under-21/20 final since 2018. The age-grade machinery did its job: players of intercounty standard were produced.There is bound to be massive churn in the Cork panel over the coming months, a certain amount of which would have been in the works whether Cork won the All-Ireland or not. The kind of change that might ultimately make a difference, though, will be a painful and time-consuming process.Limerick advance to the final without Gillane leading their scoring chargeLimerick are still waiting for Aaron Gillane to hit form this summer. Gillane has yet to play a full 70 minutes in the 2026 championship – and was replaced by Tom Morrissey on Sunday with 18 minutes of normal time remaining and Limerick trailing by two points.Gillane was also taken off against Waterford, Tipperary and in the Munster final win over Cork. His only scores across those three matches was a brace of goals against Tipperary. Gillane chipped in with a single point on Sunday – and few would have predicted the Treaty County progressing to an All-Ireland decider with their marquee forward registering just 2-1 across the campaign. Aidan O’Connor has carried the biggest scoring threat for Limerick during the championship while Diarmaid Byrnes, Cathal O’Neill, Shane O’Brien, Peter Casey, Gearóid Hegarty and Tom Morrissey have all scored more than Gillane too.Gillane missed the first two games of the Munster SHC because of a calf injury but just weeks earlier he had delivered a man of the match performance in the league decider – scoring 1-7 as Limerick claimed the title. That game also marks the last full match Gillane played. John Kiely will hope the 2023 Hurler of the Year can rediscover his magic touch for the All-Ireland final against Galway – but the Limerick manager stressed on Sunday evening that no player in the group is asked the carry the team.“We don’t operate as a talisman team. Our team is certainly not about the individual,” said Kiely.“Our team is about the collective. I have 37 players, I have 26 on matchday – 11 subs. So, it’s on me if I don’t make changes and get the most out of my group on the day.“And I think something we’ve done really well this season is maximise on match-day the contribution of the whole group. For the subs to make an impact, somebody has to come off.“Every player that comes off has had their chance to contribute. But I want to make sure that we get the whole group to give as much as we can. And as I mentioned earlier, that has been a telling impact and one that we’re very proud of.” Gordon ManningAll-Ireland semi-finals show the redemptive possibilities of the championshipAs we entered injury-time on Sunday, it looked as if Limerick were on their way to joining the dauntingly long list of Munster champions not to survive the All-Ireland semi-finals – half of them in the 30 years since the hurling championship diluted a strict knockout format.It would have been a further demonstration of the redemptive possibilities of the championship. Clare looked as distant as Ennis from the dismal form that got them walloped by Limerick last May.In the end they were caught but had given it a great rattle.Clare were part of another strange phenomenon, the midseason assurance that the top two teams are destined to meet “three times in the championship”. For a couple of years, given the ferocity of their rivalry with Limerick, Brian Lohan’s team were always earmarked to meet them in the provincial round robin, the Munster final and then, the All-Ireland.It never happened. The punishing schedule of having to play two weeks after losing a hard-fought provincial final caught up with Clare and they lost semi-finals to Kilkenny.Ironically, the year they made it in 2024 was after a Munster final in which they had been well beaten. Lohan also got to apply the lessons of 2022 and 2023 and eased off preparations before the All-Ireland quarter-final.In a further irony, they didn’t play Limerick in the final because Cork beat the champions in the semi-final.In the past two years, Cork and Limerick became the big Munster rivalry and when last year the former put a stop to John Kiely’s team’s bid for a seventh provincial title in a row, the widely anticipated rematch on Jones’s Road never happened because Limerick fell foul of the same difficulties as Clare had encountered and lost the quarter-final to Dublin.This year with Limerick’s resurgence and Cork under new management, the arrangement was finally going to come to fruition after the tightly contested league final, round-robin encounter and Munster final. Except it didn’t after Galway’s whirlwind display on Saturday.For the first time, we were nearly left without either of the presumptive All-Ireland finalists but Limerick just about held up their side of the bargain. Seán Moran