After last year’s jaded edition of the Leinster Hurling Championship, which ended with another colourless decider between Kilkenny and Galway in a half-empty Croke Park, the Leinster Council decided to tear up the script.
For the first time since the provincial round robin series was instituted, the Leinster competition would not conclude with the Wexford-Kilkenny and Galway-Dublin fixtures.
It was never officially declared policy that this was the way of things in the Leinster SHC. But since it happened six times in a row, it evidently wasn’t random either. The provincial council had taken the view that such a fixture schedule was the one best suited to generate suspense on the final weekend.
Kilkenny-Galway may be the default Leinster final in the modern era but the Wexford-Kilkenny match-up is the closest that the province offers to a ‘traditional’ provincial rivalry and thus was regarded as a fitting crescendo to the campaign.
It also meant that the two likeliest relegation candidates would face off in the last round, a schedule which makes sense and which remains in place for 2026.
However, it had begun to backfire of late, in the same way that leaving your best penalty-taker until fifth in the shootout can often do.
After years of grinding and often heavy defeats, Wexford have enjoyed an excellent win-loss ratio against Kilkenny since 2017. However, any pride at this run had become tempered by the recognition that, much of the time, their victories came against Kilkenny teams who had no need for a result.
Last year was the purest example of this, with an already eliminated Wexford defeating an experimental Kilkenny team, who were able to rest lads in advance of a Leinster final. The television producers understandably favoured the Dublin-Galway match-up in Parnell Park, which was a defacto Leinster semi-final.
Their 2023 victory over Kilkenny was important and emotional, in that it preserved Wexford’s status in the MacCarthy Cup for the following season. A week earlier, they had lost a crazy game to Westmeath, having led by 17 points at one stage.
With Antrim leading comfortably in the simultaneous game in Mullingar, a defeat would have sent Wexford down to the Joe McDonagh for 2024. They held on to win a nine-goal thriller by two points. Supporters streamed onto the pitch afterwards in relief as much as joy.
Wexford supporters embrace Lee Chin after they beat Kilkenny to avoid relegation in 2023
The campaign spoke to Wexford’s extreme inconsistency, but nor was it especially surprising. There was a massive motivation gap again that afternoon, with Kilkenny already bound for the Leinster final.
The 2022 game, Wexford’s only victory at Nowlan Park during the run, was potentially more consequential.
From Wexford’s point of view, it secured them an All-Ireland final quarter-final spot at Dublin’s expense, having lost at home to Mattie Kenny’s side earlier in the series.
Theoretically, it could also have bumped Kilkenny out of the championship altogether. Had Dublin won in Salthill at the same time, then the Cats would been sitting out the rest of the championship, and Brian Cody would have been spared another frosty sideline exchange with Henry Shefflin.
In those circumstances, Cody might have been induced to give it another run in 2023. He presumably would have deemed it an unacceptable swansong, in the same way that Alex Ferguson decided against retiring in 2012 after Man City snatched the league in the final seconds.
But Dublin lost by six points in Pearse Stadium and Kilkenny were on the way to the Leinster final again. They duly won that match, which was the kind of game that only Cody could love.
The picture looks very different heading into this year’s Kilkenny-Wexford fixture, which falls in Round 2 for a change.
The Cats’ need for a result is several orders of magnitude greater than in any of their recent games against Wexford.
The situation has become especially acute in the wake of their second Salthill hammering in the space of six weeks.
It said something about the kneejerk traditionalism that pervades much of hurling nation that so many were tipping Kilkenny to win in Galway last Saturday.
There was little in the way of recent form or available personnel that indicated that Kilkenny were likely to win the game – quite aside from the fact that they haven’t won in Pearse Stadium since the 2009 league.
Derek Lyng and Niall Corcoran react during Kilkenny’s loss to Galway
The lead-up to the game was full of urgent and purposeful warnings that Kilkenny weren’t going to go down the way they had in the league. These came accompanied with the standard mantra that “league is league”.
Such is Kilkenny’s historic hold on their rivals’ psyche, there were even suggestions that Galway had only made things harder for themselves by beating them so badly in March.
Kilkenny, with TJ Reid back in tow, did play with a bit more vim and energy than they had a month ago.
They missed a series of goal chances and may have been denied one at the end of the first half when Daithà Burke somehow got the ball into his hands when lying on his back on the goal-line (did he do so legally?).
But the eventual margin of defeat wasn’t far off what happened in the league. Even prior to John Donnelly’s sending off, they trailed by five having played with a strong enough breeze in the first half.
Since Saturday, there has been much alarm at the dip in form as well many gloomy prophecies about the Cats’ medium term prospects. Their attempted embrace of a short-passing game has naturally come in for flak.
There’s been hand-wringing about a faulty production line and the worrying reliance on a 38-year old Reid for attacking sparkle.
Former captain Andy Comerford’s entertaining soapbox slot on Kilkenny Community Radio has become required listening for national journalists.
After the game, Derek Lyng suggested that confidence might have been an issue, indicating that the 18-point loss six weeks earlier might have played on their minds.
“I thought we were a little bit nervy, to be honest,” Lyng told reporters. “Obviously the last day up here wasn’t a good experience.”
From a distance, Wexford don’t look to be in the kind of condition to exploit Kilkenny’s uncertainty.
However, closer inspection reveals some ground for tentative optimism.
Fatalism ran riot at the beginning of the year, amid a wave of player opt-outs and some injury concerns. They were blessed to escape with wins against Antrim and Down in the opening two weekends.
A certain Wexford-born sports editor at this desk announced that their lofty ambition for 2026 was survival in Division 1B and the Leinster championship. He would be content with that in the circumstances.
But things have gradually improved, with Lee Chin’s return late in the Carlow game proving the catalyst for a final quarter surge. Indeed, they nearly wound up getting promoted and would have been had they held out in the final play while leading Dublin by a point.
Some of the younger players have come on. Last weekend’s victory over Kildare on a substandard pitch Newbridge was a stodgy enough affair.
Chin spent most of the game hitting frees and Wexford struggled to get any fluidity in their play until very late on. Their chief marksman did finish the game by burying a goal in the last 10 minutes, embellishing a scoreboard that was probably in need of embellishment.
They don’t have a whole pile to lose heading to Nowlan Park to face a team who are surely on edge. It forms an exciting backdrop to the first truly two-way consequential Kilkenny-Wexford championship game in several years.
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