'Tis only the league but the league is crucial now

'Tis only the league' is a phrase of the past. We are all programmed in such a way it takes us all a while to adapt to change, whether is it right or wrong.

The league nowadays is a lot different to the league, 10, 15 or even five years ago. If you go back to the noughties, it was useful in order to get up to speed, but it was a long way off championship.

Now, the league and the championship are so close together, that you nearly have to be at full throttle come the end of it. Do you think Michael Fennelly or Cheddar Plunkett are thinking "'tis only the league' after their beatings at the weekend?

Do you think Galway manager Henry Shefflin was going back up the road after Saturday night's win over Limerick thinking 'tis only the league'?

He was in his eye.

He knows damn well that a message had been sent out. You can't win an All-Ireland through your league campaign, but I firmly believe you can lose it.

The league will stand to you if you perform well, but if you are a long way off, it's hard to build momentum back up in a short space of time. It's so difficult to build confidence within a group if things don’t start going your way.

Talk about adapting to change brings me on nicely to Kilkenny and Tipperary. Firstly, I ruffled a few feathers during the week when I said how poor a game it was last Sunday, and it was far from my intention.

I have grown up watching the two counties, be it in league or championship, tear shreds out of each other for 70 minutes, turning many of the encounters into classics.

You wouldn’t get an inch, every score you got was hard earned, and a couple of scraps were always thrown in as well.

It was dog eat dog stuff.

Secondly, coming back to adapting to change, I have heard a lot of 'this isn’t how