Allianz Hurling League Division One final: Clare v Kilkenny (Saturday, Semple Stadium, 7.15pm, live on TG4)
A warm-up competition for the Championship? Adrian Mullen can only smile at that one as he and Kilkenny prepare to face Clare in Thurles.
An Allianz League medal is on the line - surprisingly the gifted forward doesn’t have one - and he is, if not desperate, certainly keen to finally pick one up.
“I can tell you now, it doesn’t feel like a warm-up competition to us or to the players involved,” said Mullen who will turn his attention after this evening’s Division 1 decider to Antrim and Kilkenny’s April 21 Leinster SHC opener.
“The games themselves are so tough and physical, it demands a lot of you. I definitely wouldn’t call it a warm-up campaign anyway. You approach the games like Championship games.”
Part of the reason that people question just how interested teams like Kilkenny are in the League is all the experimenting they do each spring.
They’ve managed to field 35 different players in just six games so far.
Limerick handed game time to 36 players in the same amount of games while Tipperary, remarkably, only needed five matches to assess 38 different players.
All of which gives the sense of the top teams trying things out, tweaking and experimenting with their greater focus being on the Championship.
Mullen can only say how it has felt for him and starting every single league game this season has been a genuine blessing.
He missed the majority of the 2022 and 2023 League campaigns because of injury and was tossed in at the deep end when he did return last year, against Limerick in the final.
“That was a tough game to be thrown into because I had come back from a bad hamstring injury at the time,” he said.
“I was out for over three months and coming back into that game was definitely tough.”
Kilkenny, lost, of course. They haven’t actually won a League final since 2018.
They shared the title in 2021 with Galway but they don’t really count, do they? Did he even get a medal?
“I actually don’t know,” smiled Mullen. “I don’t remember getting one anyway!”
Half-forward Mullen then is that rarest of species, a Kilkenny senior who has never felt the weight of the MacCarthy Cup or the National League trophy in his hands.
“I’ve been playing with Kilkenny the last five or six years and I’m yet to win one, yeah, so it would be a massive achievement to do it, and a massive achievement for the team,” said Mullen.
Whatever about their league drought, the fact that it’s almost a decade since Kilkenny won an All-Ireland is the real head scratcher.
“Unfortunately I’ve been in three All-Ireland finals since I started with Kilkenny and I’ve come out the wrong side of them,” said Mullen, extending his tale of woe.
“Obviously we’d absolutely love to get to an All-Ireland and come out the right side of it but the Championship is cutthroat these days.
“Any team can beat any team on any given day so we can’t look too far ahead or get too bogged down by the previous years.”