Six minutes before half-time in Nowlan Park last June Lar Corbett’s hamstring snapped and Seamus Callanan was summoned from the bench. Tipperary had spent the first half of the year carefully restoring Callanan’s self-esteem as an inter-county hurler but for the qualifiers they dropped him and not for the first time in his Tipperary career Callanan was starting again from a position of reinforced doubt.
He bounced onto the field. The first ball he got, in the last minute of the half, he flashed it over the bar; the next ball he got, in the first minute of the second half, he flashed it over the bar too. “Callanan is the type of player,” said James O’Connor in the television commentary, “when he gets two points he could get six.”
For the remainder of the match, though, he secured one possession. Tipp were chiselling scores from the granite of Kilkenny’s defence and Callanan disappeared. Brian Hogan caught two balls over his head in quick succession, so they moved him to the inside line. They needed a goal. A spark. Something? Nothing.
Here was Callanan’s Tipperary career in microcosm: the absolute certainty of his class and the paralysing uncertainty about whether it would amount to anything on any given day.
For every team and every elite player of the last dozen years Kilkenny have answered the meaningful questions. It doesn’t matter how good you think you are; it doesn’t matter how good you looked against somebody else: if you want to know how good you really are, they’ll tell you. They won’t wait to be asked.
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For Callanan that has been an uncomfortable process. Kilkenny believe they have his number. They’ve believed it for some time. He knows. Callanan has carried that load onto the field against Kilkenny for years and for most of that time it has been a dead weight on his performances.
The start of the 2011 All-Ireland final is a window into Kilkenny’s thinking on Callanan. After a couple of minutes a ball went over the sideline by the Cusack Stand and as he jogged back into play Jackie Tyrell made it his business to jostle Callanan with a shoulder.
A couple of minutes later there was an off-the-ball fuss around the Kilkenny square; JJ Delaney and Callanan were poking each other with hurleys and pawing like bears. Brian Gavin noted their names but it was just the start Kilkenny wanted against Callanan: two of their grizzly old dogs trespassing on his personal space.
Twice in next five minutes he ended up on the floor in contact situations around the ball; one was an unpenalised foul, the other wasn’t. At half-time he was taken off, scoreless with just two possessions to his name. Disarmed.
Walter Walsh will be the biggest man on the field today, a stone heavier than Callanan and two inches taller. But Callanan will be the next biggest, precisely the same height (6ft 3in) and weight (14 st 7lbs) as Michael Fennelly. Callanan, though, has always been a nippy corner forward trapped in a big man’s body. He doesn’t make power plays. It’s not his game.
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Winning primary possession in the half forward line was an issue for Tipp for a couple of years, particularly under Declan Ryan, and Callanan was drawn into that difficulty for a while. Employing him as a puck-out target should have been a reasonable ploy but he doesn’t have an aptitude for dominating opponents under the dropping ball and he doesn’t trade on aggression.
What he needs is space. He found it late in the 2010 All-Ireland final against Kilkenny when he was introduced as a sub. Callanan belted over two points at a time when Kilkenny were tunnelling their way back into the match. “This guy can be very explosive,” said Michael Duignan in the TV commentary. “Tipp will be hoping he can do something special and different.”
That hope has trailed him throughout his career. A year earlier, in the second half of the 2009 All-Ireland final against Kilkenny, he did everything Tipperary could have expected. He scored three points from play — one from a self-help turnover — and made three scores for others.
The key to most of those plays, though, was that he was moving onto ball played into space. In the first half of that game he was beaten all-ends-up to a couple of high balls by JJ Delaney even though Delaney was conceding four inches. Delaney will take the ball out of anybody’s sky but in Callanan’s case it didn’t have to be the Kilkenny full-back sharing the landing area: he can’t make do with situations where he’s static and the ball is dropping on his head.
Think of Callanan’s three goals in Nowlan Park in the National League, his career best performance against Kilkenny by a mile. The ball was worked to him in positions where his cold genius as a finisher could flourish. Kieran Joyce started that match as full back and the experiment was promptly shelved; before the game was out two other Kilkenny players had tried their luck, including Brian Hogan who was removed at half-time. Delaney, though, wasn’t involved that day. So, is he the real issue for Callanan?
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On the face of it Delaney smothered him again in the League final in May. Callanan was the outstanding player in the competition, with 5-53 to his name coming into the final, but in Thurles he was peripheral. He spent the guts of an hour at full forward; in that time just seven balls reached his zone and Delaney won five of them.
A couple were good deliveries that he wasted but the service was so fractured that he went 20 minutes in the first half without touching the ball in open play and there was another 20 minutes in the second half when he touched the ball just once. Could he have done more? Could the others have done more to involve him? Both.
There were two balls in the first half, though, that clarified his anxiety. Both times he gathered possession in front of Delaney with time to turn and make a play. Instead, he was in a desperate hurry to shoot. One dropped short, the other was blocked.
Against Galway two months later, or against Cork three weeks ago, his deadliness was defined by a clear mind. He was in control of the ball and the opportunity. In the League final against Kilkenny that wasn’t the case.
This is a defining day in Callanan’s career. It is six years since he first appeared in the League semi-final against Kilkenny and coated their victory with two late points. Today he must do it from the start and keep doing it until Kilkenny forget all the things they used to think about him.