Liam Kearns, who will face Wicklow in his first competitive game as Offaly manager. Photo: AC Sports Images.

Fine dining it isn't as pre-season fare kicks off

Kevin Egan Column

Picture this for a moment. You had to attend hospital for minor surgery, scheduled for the morning, and your consultant asked you to fast from 8pm the night before. Except there’s an issue in the theatre, and your procedure gets delayed for four hours, then two hours, and it eventually takes place at 6pm.

The catering staff have gone home, and due to a delay in your consultant signing off on your discharge, you’re only released to go home approaching midnight. By now, all that’s open is a motorway service station, with a fine range of stale, leftover pastries from that morning.

Fine dining it isn’t, but since you’re so famished, it feels like manna from Heaven. Or manna from somewhere, at any rate.

That’s how we tend to feel about the Walsh and O’Byrne Cups, particularly when they come on the back of a winter like this one, where no Offaly club was able to hold the attention of the county’s supporters into the festive season.

Purely because they’re first into action, we’ll start with Liam Kearns’ first match in charge of the Offaly footballers, at home to Wicklow tomorrow afternoon (Saturday).

Wicklow’s season got underway on Wednesday evening when a very experimental Dublin side turned a one-point half-time lead into a 2-15 to 0-9 victory. Just one Dublin player, Brian O’Leary, out of the 25 that featured in Baltinglass, played any championship minutes in 2022, so Offaly should be hopeful of a positive start to the season. Admittedly, the prospects for next Wednesday evening in Parnell Park, when Kearns’ hands will be tied by the significant number of players with Sigerson Cup commitments, look very different.

Much has been made of the absence of a number of stalwarts from last year, including John Moloney, Niall Darby, Paddy Dunican, Jordan Hayes and (for now at least) Niall McNamee, with two very talented defenders - Eoghan Rigney and Kieran Dolan - also unavailable due to long term injuries. However on the other side of the coin, the return of Peter Cunningham, Ciarán Donnelly, Cian Farrell and Nigel Dunne balances the scale to a considerable degree.

Looking a few months down the road, Offaly’s fortunes in 2023 are likely to depend heavily on how the U-20 heroes of 18 months ago have progressed on the road to adult football. At this time of year, expect players like Rory Egan, Lee Pearson, Jack Bryant and Aaron Kellaghan to commit their focus to Sigerson football, which is a perfectly good testing ground for younger players, and anyone who fares well in that arena deserves to be respected for doing so.

However there is always the potential for a springer or two to emerge from the pack, and that’s where the next week will prove very interesting. This time last year, Offaly were competitive, but ultimately unsuccessful, in a home tie against Dublin – but among the stars of the day were Lee Pearson and Ciarán Donnelly in the full-back line, and that alone made it a worthwhile outing.

This week is not hugely interesting from a results perspective, as it’s odds on that Offaly win tomorrow and then find the going incredibly tough in Donnycarney, but if a few players stand out in the same fashion, then there will be something positive to be taken from this preseason campaign.

Formidable opposition awaits in Callan

After suffering the early season setback of a €250 fine for playing a challenge match against Tipperary in the off season – or to be more accurate, a €250 fine for not doing a sufficiently good job of hiding the fact that they played a challenge match against Tipperary – the Offaly hurlers will open their 2023 season with another contest against blue chip opposition, this time in the shape of Kilkenny.

Under Brian Cody, or at least in the latter half of his reign as manager of the Cats, Kilkenny weren’t unduly worried about how they fared in the Walsh Cup. Kilkenny featured in just three of the last ten finals, and none since 2018 – unlike Wexford (six final appearances), Dublin (five) and Galway (four) in that time.

Already, Wexford have sold nearly 7,000 tickets for their round three clash against Kilkenny on Saturday evening, January 21, so it’s safe to say that Darragh Egan will want to hit the ground running in a game like that.

Will the stripey men change their approach under Derek Lyng? On the face of it, he might find it tough to make that happen, even if he wanted to. The Kilkenny senior panel still contained over 50 players as of the start of this week, and that’s without any of the Ballyhale contingent. That will have to be cut down very soon, and Lyng is quite likely to give a run on Sunday to those players that are towards the bottom of the pecking order.

From Offaly’s perspective, games of this quality should make for very good preparation for the league, particularly with so few players from the county involved in the Fitzgibbon Cup over the coming month. Of course, that’s another worrying sign with the medium and long-term future in mind, but for now, Johnny Kelly will feel that he has the artillery to go well in a Walsh Cup where Offaly will play two home games, and presumably a quite experimental Kilkenny line-up.

With Division 2A rivals Carlow, Down and Kildare all operation in the Kehoe Cup, this represents a huge opportunity for Offaly to get used to hurling at a high level before a crucial league opener in Ballycran. Hopefully a competitive showing is on the cards, and perhaps even a tight finish.