Four faults: Richie Bennis's side made costly errors

Would that Oscar Wilde had been in Thurles last Sunday. The first goal may be regarded as a misfortune, the second looked like carelessness, the third was pure farce and heaven knows what the great man would have said about the fourth. Something to the effect, perhaps, that if you concede two soft goals in a championship match you may still get away with it whereas if you concede four you don't deserve to.

And that was the thing. Poor and all as they were, it wasn't the first two goals that knocked the stuffing out of Limerick. Though 0-6 wasn't a wonderful first-half return against the stiff wind, neither was it an abject one; the All Ireland finalists had confined their opponents to seven points plus two goalscoring chances, one of them saved. If Limerick didn't have cause to be doing handstands of happiness at the break, Clare had even less cause.

Twelve minutes into the second half the gap was down to two points and the team that had dismantled a 10-point deficit in jig time at the same venue last summer were sucking diesel. At which juncture Mark Foley turned to Mike O'Brien and said, "There's only two or three of us hurling here, but if we don't concede another goal we'll still win." Quite.

Given that one cannot legislate for goals like those conceded by Limerick seven days ago, was it anything more than a bad day at the office? Foley, the captain, isn't quite sure. "We hadn't been going great up to it. There'd been a little bit of flatness all year and we were hoping to be able to resurrect it come the championship. And at half-time I was confident – definitely – we'd go on and win, because other than the goals we gave away there hadn't been a lot between the teams."

To Foley, criticisms of the three-man midfield the losers deployed against the wind are misplaced. From a defensive point of view, he argues, it "worked alright". In terms of constructiveness, on the other hand, it fell short of the level reached in the third match against Tipperary last year, when Limerick employed a three-man midfield and moved the sliotar across the pitch with patience and intelligence. With Donncha Sheehan positioned deep, they drove too much aimless ball into empty space in the first half, a failing that was the source of Pat Vaughan's deus ex machina of a goal.

For all that Foley believes the team, himself included, could have hurled better, as a collective Limerick nevertheless gave as generously of themselves as they have in every one of their championship fixtures under Richie Bennis. Play last Sunday's game again, they'd score 1-16 again and this time it would be enough to win by a point or two. For that's Limerick. They're a 1-16 team by vocation, by DNA, by everything. Sometimes that 1-16 will be enough; once in a blue moon they'll end up in a fabulous freak of a game and hit five goals to win an All Ireland semi-final; and sometimes that 1-16 simply won't be enough. So it goes. One of the strengths of this group is that they don't try to be what they're not. Midfield did their bit as usual and will never do more, also as usual. But Bennis and co needed Seamus Hickey and Mike Fitzgerald to step up on last year's promise; Hickey's opening quarter apart, they didn't. They needed Sean O'Connor to show something; he didn't. They needed Ollie Moran to lead the line with the same gusto and bravery of last year; he did, but it wasn't enough and was never going to be in light of the other lacunae. That Niall Moran's return of 0-5 amounted to more than his input is a common occurrence with wing-forwards and was of a piece with Conor Fitzgerald's four-point haul in the 2006 National League final, but the younger Moran will need to show more from general play next time out.

Incidentally, the suggestion in one paper this week that Bennis should step down was punditry at its most woodenheaded. So one depressing afternoon invalidates the sun-splashed days of last summer and, no less importantly, the unity, organisation and strength of purpose the manager and his selectors have brought to what not so long ago was the main wing of hurling's lunatic asylum?

Limerick won't win the 2008 All Ireland under Richie Bennis. But they won't win it under anybody else either.