Another sunny day in Tipperary's resurgent summer as they put Galway to the sword

Irish Times

4 hours ago

About 15 minutes after the final whistle the slow-moving cordon of stewards had herded the
Tipperary
supporters into a peninsula of ground in front of the Mackey Stand. Over the public address they had already been warned, twice, that the water sprinklers were about to be turned on. They laughed the first time; they paid no heed the second time. Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody got wet.
In Tipp's resurgent summer, this was another sunny day. Getting to Croke Park is the solemn mission of every Tipp manager, but there were times in Liam Cahill's second season when it must have seemed like another galaxy. It is little more than a year since they bottomed out against Cork in Thurles, on an excruciating day when thousands of their supporters went to ground. In that time, their rehabilitation has been remarkable.
When they look again, they will find kinks
in this performance
. Galway were so disjointed and disorientated at times that it is impossible to use them as a reliable benchmark. But Tipp were full of pace and directness in attack and bristled with energy all over the field. They won with authority.
Between the league and championship, Galway had lost four games by double-figures this year, and they were only spared that indignity here with a scrappy goal in the last minute of stoppage time. Rhys Shelly put his hand to a ball that he would easily have blocked with his hurley, and Declan McLoughlin's shot staggered over Shelly's shoulder.
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In the event Galway lost by eight points, just as they had done in the Leinster final. Once again, though, they had not threatened to win. In the first half, when the game was ripe for the picking, they made four or five incisions in the Tipp cover, searching for goals. But each time the final pass was misconceived or poorly executed.
Kevin Cooney forced Shelly into a save that the Tipp goalie would have been mortified not to make and Brian Concanon shot wildly, on the spin, when Conor Whelan had set him up in front of goal.
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Tipperary's Jason Forde scores a point despite Daithí Burke of Galway. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho
But when the goal they so badly needed finally arrived they did nothing with it. Five minutes into the second half Colm Molloy squirmed along the endline and beat Shelly with a fierce diagonal shot, reducing Tipp's lead to just two points. Playing with the breeze, the game was there to be seized. Tipperary grabbed it.
The outstanding Andrew Ormond scored immediately from the puck-out, igniting a run of five Tipp points without reply. In the same ten-minute period Galway hit five wides. For Galway, the symmetry was crippling.
Liam Cahill bemoaned Tipp's efficiency afterwards. Between play and dead balls they had a staggering 51 shots at the target operating at a 57 per cent conversion rate. In Cahill's estimation, '10 or 15' shots had been the wrong decision. To beat Kilkenny in an All-Ireland semi-final, they will need to add the guts of 10 percentage points to that number.
'We'll look at that and we'll see, but that's a very interesting stat,' said Cahill. 'Our shots off are important. Every team is chasing it now because you have to be in the 30-point bracket or the 2-25, 3-25 to have any chance of winning an All-Ireland.'
Their potential for heavy scoring is obvious. In the first half, especially, Galway couldn't lay a glove on the Tipp forwards. By the break, only Darragh McCarthy had failed to score from play: the other five had scored 13 points; Jake Morris, John McGrath, Ormond and Sam O'Farrell had combined for seven assists too.
Oisín O'Donoghue's introduction proves inspired, with the Tipperary full-forward finding the back of the net after an expansive attack that tears Galway apart
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The difference between the forward lines was cohesion. The Tipp forwards moved in harmony and found each other with instant passes. Time and again, one of their shooters was isolated in a pocket of space. Every invitation to shoot was accepted.
At the other end, very little of Galway's play was economical. They finished the game with 16 wides and half a dozen unrealised goal chances. Too often, they looked for an extra pass.
After the Leinster final, Micheál Donoghue was adamant that Galway had not played the way they had planned, and that was surely the case again. After Henry Shefflin's three years in charge, this Galway team urgently needed an identity and a sustainable way of playing. This season, they never reached those goals.
Just eight of Galway's scores came from play and they coughed up 1-14 from turnovers. In a knock-out game, against a team from their peer group, all of that was unbearable.
'Look today is raw,' said Donoghue. 'Today will hurt. In terms of where we are, where they came from last year, today might not be the right day to say it is a step forward [but] I think we have made a step forward. There are huge learnings to take from the season. We will reflect on that and regroup again.'
Maybe they have bottomed out. Tipp know how that feels. They made a new start.