Clare v Kilkenny

Clare would love an open Croke Park slugfest, while Kilkenny will want to keep it tight and scrappy, suggests Eoin Ryan ahead of today's first All-Ireland ...

When they get that period of dominance can they get Peter Duggan, Shane O'Donnell and Tony Kelly all hitting the ball over the bar, three or four in a row to get two scores away from Kilkenny? Because if you don't Kilkenny will suffocate you and it drains your confidence as a group. It’s hard to know whether the different lengths of time since they last played will have much of a bearing. Follow the All-Ireland Hurling Championship semi-finals this weekend, Kilkenny v Clare (5.30pm on Saturday) and Limerick v Galway (3.30pm on Sunday), via our live blog on rte.ie/sport or on the RTÉ News app. "And the majority of teams who get the purple patch against Kilkenny don't. We saw it when Galway hit a lot of wides, suddenly TJ hits every free over the bar and suddenly you're five points down. "If they're going to crowd the inside line, then we have to work our shooters out the field and that's where maybe, an Eoin Cody out to wing forward. "As a supporter, you'd be saying that it'll go down to the wire and we'll have to play very well to beat them," he told RTÉ Sport recently. they are working well as a unit and weren’t getting caught following lads and being pulled all over the place [against Galway]. It’s up the field then where I think they can be better. I think it takes such bravery to say if they are crowding defence and we are chasing a match, let's try something a little different. In the Ger Loughnane era, the teams met twice in semi-finals, winning one each: Clare in 1997 and Kilkenny in Brian Cody’s first campaign in charge two years later. The younger legs of his in-form Ballyhale clubmates Adrian Mullen (0-20 so far) and Eoin Cody (2-11) mean he can concentrate on winning ball further afield. They are in the rare position of being slight underdogs. There have been regular league meetings (Kilkenny haven’t won since 2015) but this is only the eighth championship clash overall, mostly as Clare didn’t win Munster for another 63 years after losing the 1932 All-Ireland final to today’s opponents.