Dublin defender Liam Rushe believes Galway's favourites' tag for the All-Ireland senior hurling championship is fully justified.

The Tribesmen are currently 2/1 to capture their first Liam McCarthy Cup since 1988 and with his team having been hammered by them in last month's Leinster quarter-final, Rushe believes that Micheál Donoghue's charges will be hard stopped this summer.

"Hard to play against," he told the Irish Examiner. "I still don't think there's been a proper analysis done of how they're playing. They're going to be hard beat, they've a lot of forwards who can win their own ball and score.

"They're back to the constant rotation that you saw in 2012, which is hard to pin down, and they have a new role for Joe (Canning), drifting out to midfield. That's the hardest thing to pin down. What are you going to do there? You're not going to send your centre-back off to midfield to play there and have four backs.

"They really have developed a style that's very difficult to play against. Like, they went a man up and withdrew everyone out the field anyway. So somehow we were a man down but there was still all the space in their attacking half.

"They've become very tactically shrewd in the last year."

Tweet

Most Read Stories