Tipping back to big time after spell in wilderness

RTÉ News​

5 days ago

Only a year after their demoralised manager officially declared them to be in midst of a 'rebuild job', Tipperary are back on the big stage, far sooner than anyone imagined.
Last summer, the talk was of how they had displaced Waterford as the sick man of the Munster hurling championship. Perennially aggrieved Leinster hurling folk were demanding to know why they weren't forced to partake in a relegation play-off with Carlow.
Liam Cahill's first campaign had tailed off badly and the second was adjudged to be a full disaster.
Even in real time, their annihilation at home to Cork last May felt like one of those landmark beatings that would be etched in the memory for a long time.
Worse again, the supporters had more or less abandoned the team. "You'd have to wonder - is the fight gone out of Tipp?" Donal Óg Cusack said on that evening's Sunday Game.
"Even their supporters. Where were all their supporters today? Tipp's a hurling county. Cork outnumbered them, it looked like 10 to 1."
Things had gotten so bad that when Pat Horgan had a perfectly good goal - Cork's fifth - mysteriously disallowed late in the game, the instinctive suspicion of many watching at home was that it was done out of sympathy (Cusack bluntly labelled it a "sympathy vote").
And yet, a year later, here they are, the only team standing in the way of Horgan and Cork's long-awaited All-Ireland title.
Tipp have had lulls before, most infamously the nine championship campaigns without a win from 1974 to 1982.
They mustered just one Munster title between 1994 and 2007, albeit that came accompanied with an All-Ireland title during Nicky English's stint in charge in 2001. They previously became the first team to reach an All-Ireland final via the backdoor in 1997 but lost to Clare.
The early 2020s weren't as drawn out as the 70s slump but there were plenty of bitter days, with just two Munster championship wins in five years. This included those two winless round robin campaigns in 2022 and 2024.
It was a lean time, not least for the many Tipp-owned and managed hostelries in the capital.
During the first half of the 2020s, the only place you could watch Tipperary play in Croke Park was in Ryan's on Camden Street where they've been showing the 2010, 2016 and 2019 All-Ireland finals on a more or less constant loop for some years now.
Ireland could be playing in a World Cup semi-final and the game could have gone to penalties but in Ryan's, you'd still be watching Lar whip in his hat-trick goal or Bubbles declaring that "we're the champions of f****n' Ireland!"
GAA HQ no longer resounded to a staccato drumbeat of 'TIPP! TIPP! TIPP!', a familiar soundtrack for the previous decade and a bit.
Tipperary had been a mainstay at the latter stages of the All-Ireland for most of the 2010s.
After Babs Keating's turbulent and ill-fated second stint in charge ended in 2007, Liam Sheedy stepped into the senior job, with Eamon O'Shea arriving in as coach. It was a propitious time, with an infusion of talent coming from the underage ranks.
In retrospect, Tipp's All-Ireland winning minor team of 2006, who halted Joe Canning's bid for a three-in-a row at the grade, has to be considered one of the most successful minor teams of all time. It provided no fewer than eight players who would go on to win senior All-Irelands, including Padraic Maher, Brendan Maher, Seamus Callanan and Noel McGrath.
They featured in six All-Ireland finals in 11 years, winning three and losing three. The trio of finals between 2009 and 2011 was the bluebloods' nirvana, a time when the traditionalists still ruled the roost and the term 'sweeper' put people in mind of Franz Beckenbauer rather than Tadhg de Burca.
In 2009, they fell just short against a Kilkenny side operating at close to their peak, the 'Did ya think it was a penalty yourself, Marty' final. The following year, Corbett rifled home his famous hat-trick in the teeming rain as they halted the five-in-a-row, claiming a first All-Ireland in nine years. Then Kilkenny got their own back in 2011, aka the John Mulhall final.
After a two-year hiatus, the drawn 2014 decider provided us with what most neutrals regarded as the greatest final of all. Brian Cody, unsurprisingly, was far more enamoured of the comparatively dour replay when his defenders succeeded in putting manners on the stylish Tipp forward line. At the All-Stars night that year, Bubbles Dwyer was still inclined to call into question the infallibility of Hawkeye and he had his reasons. This take would age better than people thought at the time.
As Kilkenny's imperial phase finally drew to a close, Tipperary beat them comfortably in All-Ireland deciders in '16 and '19, Callanan delivering one of the great final displays in the former. As usual in those years, Tipp were rarely content to win a game by three or four points when the chance was there to stretch the margin out towards double digits.
Tipp's bitter rivals, a grouping which incorporates almost every other serious hurling county, taunted them about their 'one-in-a-rows' and failure to defend an All-Ireland title since 1965. Only being able to win periodic 'one-in-a-rows' is an exceptionally first-world hurling problem, though their erstwhile privileged compadres in the 'Big Three' don't tend to let them forget it.
But the recession, when it finally came, hit hard. Ger Loughnane prematurely called time on the 2010s generation during their unsuccessful 2018 Munster round-robin campaign. Though like many a doom-mongering economist before him, he was right eventually.
In his second spell in charge, Sheedy delivered an All-Ireland title but was accused by some critics of postponing a necessary transitional period too long. After successive quarter-final losses to Galway and Waterford in the Covid years, Sheedy departed and the lean times had really begun.
What changed this year? There seems to be no magic formula anyway, no sudden discovery.
The players from Cahill's back-to-back U21 winning teams in 2018 and 2019 have come of age, the likes of Robert Doyle, Bryan O'Mara, Andrew Ormond, Eoghan Connolly and Conor Stakelum. Jake Morris had already had done so.
Added to that, they've had an infusion from the present Under-20 side, with Darragh McCarthy the most celebrated graduate but Sam O'Farrell and Oisín O'Donoghue nailing down their place in the team/squad.
Cahill is a subscriber to the Cody philosophy of management, at all times stressing the importance of "honesty", "fight" and "workrate". He evidently has also adopted the Cody tactic of only firing back at critics from a position of strength.
In the same way that the Kikenny manager used to wait until after the All-Ireland final was won to get stuff off his chest, Cahill had largely held his tongue regarding his critics until Tipperary's recovery was officially complete.
Speaking since the semi-final win over Kilkenny, Cahill spoke of the "hurt" he felt at the criticism that was levied during his first two seasons in charge.
"The ones that Cahill flogs his teams, his excruciating training sessions. I felt it was disingenuous," The Tipp manager said, when asked to expand. "Liam Cahill doesn't make it up as he goes along."
That narrative had gained traction largely due to the recent trend of Cahill's teams over-performing in the league relative to the championship, which also explained why few were initially persuaded by their appearance in the league final.
During the last two summers, the tendency was for pundits to stress his disappointing last championship campaign with Waterford, rather than the first two seasons, in which he led them to an All-Ireland final and then a semi-final.
Early in this year's league, Cahill drew a pointed distinction between the "knowledgeable" Tipp fans who understood it was a transitional phase and the "less knowledgeable" ones for whom that message wouldn't resonate. At least now, the less knowledgeable Tipperary crowd must like what they're seeing.
They go into Sunday as clear underdogs though given where they started, the season will be counted as a success anyway. And Cahill has delighted in proving people wrong.
"The reality of it is at the time I came in in 2023 most people in Tipperary knew that there was a big change coming. We had a number of really top-class players for the last decade who were just coming towards the end of their inter-county careers.
"Unfortunately, when you're in a county as demanding as Tipperary not everybody sees that and understands that, and expectedly so.
"In fairness to the county board as well they stood by me... They had patience, look, we find ourselves where we are, thank God."