Martin Breheny: Pandit-Land will blow Brian Cody’s influence against John Kiely in the final

And when it’s over at 5:05 on Sunday, The Sunday game The crew will no doubt rush into a conclave to edit clips and prepare graphics showing why the victorious manager won the tactical battle. Bright and shadowed areas of the playing field are added for a dramatic if utterly useless effect.

Man of the Match will be from the winning side (even if they won by just a point and there were three better candidates from the opposition), who also get more than half of the Team of the Season spots.

All of this is part of the analysis’ winner-takes-all approach, derived from the modern trend of being heavily impressed by the last game or two you’ve watched.

Former players and managers – who now completely dominate the world of broadcast professionals – are hired because their experiences are said to have equipped them with knowledge and insight unavailable to the rest of us.

Based on this, only cows could tell the difference between cream and milk, but they tend to remain silent on the subject.

Far from telling us something we don’t know, most of the experts either utter the obvious judgments based solely on the outcome of the game, or throw a made-up comment aimed at eliciting a reaction and their profile on the social improve media. Where is the insight, the jewels of knowledge that make the rest of us applaud them for showing something we haven’t discovered? It rarely happens.

I guarantee that on the final day of hurling, the TV and radio pundits will crown either Cody or Kiely a tactical god, depending on the outcome.

If Kilkenny wins, it will be presented as a lesson from the grandmaster; If Limerick wins, it will be a case of the fresh-thinking innovator outsmarting an older rival. It’s so predictable and in all likelihood not remotely related to the facts.

Let’s take Galway vs Limerick last Sunday. It wasn’t like Kiely gave Henry Shefflin a tactical lesson. Nor was it Limerick’s increased experience and the confidence that comes with success that changed the game.

The difference was much more fundamental. When Kiely made substitutions around the three-quarters mark, he had Peter Casey, Cian Lynch, David Reidy and Cathal O’Neill to call on. Shefflin had no such power on the bench. In fact, it was well below what is required at this level.

Quite simply, Limerick had a higher quality throughout the squad. If Shefflin had Limericks Subs Galway would almost certainly be preparing for the finals by now, so the main difference was in the production lines, not the way the teams were set up. This applies to most games.

Cody was praised for Kilkenny’s tactical approach against Clare on Saturday, which is interesting. Many pundits have been throwing sharp barbs at Kilkenny’s alleged failure to adapt to the modern game for several years.

Sheer nonsense, of course, but having failed to win an All-Ireland since 2015, it was easy to brand Cody as ‘old school’. Age discrimination in the workplace? Probably.

On Saturday he was praised for doing everything right. Maybe he did, but it’s also true that Clare was miserable. Twenty-four wides, many of which shot without much pressure, says a lot about her performance.

It was certainly way below their abilities, but were they overrated from the start? Pandit-land kept telling us how Brian Lohan changed everything, but was that hype?

We’ve been told time and time again that the level in Munster is much higher than in Leinster, but that also turned out to be utter nonsense.

Limerick have certainly been the best team in the country in recent years but they were tested to their limits by runners-up Leinster on Sunday. As for the rest of Munster, Cork lost to Galway and Clare just got past a Wexford team badly weakened by the early loss of Rory O’Connor.

Previously, Kilkenny, Galway, Wexford and Dublin had won six, drawn one and lost two of their nine league games against Munsters.

That campaign ended with pundit land boldly proclaiming that Waterford was the big new show in town and best equipped to challenge Limerick’s match-three bid. More overreaction to the latest trend. Waterford didn’t even make it into Munster’s top three.

The moral of the story? Trust your own instincts when judging games. And ignore all buzzwords, especially those from other sports where they actually mean something.

I recently heard an expert on RTÉ talk about how a player “fell in the pocket” hoping the ball would come out of a “ruck”. He was speaking hurling, not rugby, and sounded very pleased with himself. dear oh dear

“Throws” are more than a temporary problem

After several years of complaining about hurling umpires allowing blatant throws to be disguised as legal hand passes, I never thought I’d write this, but here it is – it was preferable to what’s happening now.

The referees are stricter on “throwing” this year, but since the starting point was so low it only added to the problem. Players used to know they would get away with the vast majority of throws. Now they get away with a significant number of them.

There was no attempt to eradicate them completely. Instead, it looks like a half-hearted effort, a case of being seen doing something. It’s like the umpires believe there’s a rough quota that needs to be filled, so they penalize from time to time, but not always.

Player A gets penalized for throwing, but Player B doesn’t – at least not for the next five or ten minutes, then it’s time to ping someone else.

Former Tipperary All-Ireland winner Conor O’Donovan, a longtime campaigner against “tossing,” has a word for it — tokenism. One cannot contradict that.

Stopping Galligan is vital to Westmeath

A place in the history books beckons Cavan or Westmeath if they attempt to become the inaugural Tailteann Cup winners at Croke Park on Saturday, but captain Raymond Galligan as the best goalkeeper of a season has likely already achieved it.

He has scored 0-28 from Frees and ’45s in the league and championship (Ulster and Tailteann Cup) and will most likely go past 30 against Westmeath.

His biggest hits came in the Tailteann Cup against Down when he landed 7-0 (four frees, three ’45s) and against Leitrim and Waterford in Division 4 when he kicked 5-0 twice.

It’s quite a batting average but then he started his Cavan career as a forward 16 years ago before taking over as goalkeeper in 2015 so his scoring instinct has always been strong.

Most districts use their goalies as long-distance runners these days, but few can match Galligan’s consistency. It will be crucial for Westmeath not to give him an opportunity to go off target to leave the pitch.