The striking thing about the continuing commentary on Cathal Barrett’s exclusion from the Tipperary panel is the focus on short-term consequences. The belief that Tipperary’s chances of beating Galway today are wholly undermined by his absence and that Michael Ryan has sabotaged Tipperary’s prospects of retaining the All-Ireland for the first time in more than 50 years by not softening his position and granting Barrett a pardon. Very little, maybe nothing, has been said about the potential long-term gains of Ryan’s stance.
Ten days ago, at Tipperary’s media briefing in advance of today’s match, Ryan made it abundantly clear that “there will be no more changes” to the Tipperary panel in 2017. It was reported that a number of senior players had made a petition to Ryan on Barrett’s behalf and that other approaches had been made by concerned parties. Ryan rebuffed all representations.
The mistake is to evaluate Barrett’s case in isolation. For the last five years successive Tipperary managements have been dealing with explosions of indiscipline, in various settings and on a variety of scales. A handful of incidents reached the courts though not the pages of the local or national press. In that sense, but in that sense only, the fall-out was contained. Everybody on the panel and plenty of people in Tipperary knew the score.
Ryan had acted as a Tipperary selector for five of the previous seven seasons before he took over as manager. He had an intimate knowledge of the players in his dressing room, their back story and in some cases their failings. The culture that surrounded the team was that stuff would happen from time to time but that stuff would be sorted. Players would have been carpeted for messing up but nobody was cut from the panel. The ultimate sanction was held in reserve. For years, though, none of the players lived in mortal dread of it.
The last Tipperary manager to publicly drop a player for a breach of discipline was Babs Keating in 2006. After their Munster final loss to Cork Tipp had a scheduled recovery session on the following night. However, five players went drinking on Monday and skipped the session. Shane McGrath, Conor O’Mahony and John Carroll were hauled over the coals and made to train separately on the following Thursday night but Michael Webster and Redser O’Grady, who was captain that year, were dropped from the squad. Webster returned to the panel for the following season but O’Grady never played again.
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In this case Ryan needed to make a statement of that magnitude. Barrett had crossed the line in the past. This wasn’t his first offence.
What happens when you make exceptions? Two years ago there was a situation in Clare that got messy. Three players were punished for a breach of discipline but one of them, Davy O’Halloran, accused the Clare management of “double standards.” By his account another high-profile player had committed a similar breach of the code but his infraction had been ignored.
The player in question had apparently admitted to another member of the panel that he had been quietly pulled up about his drinking and his cards had been marked. No further action was taken against him. This spring, however, that same high-profile player was dropped quietly for a number of weeks for a breach of discipline. It was handled discreetly but firmly. Would that player have thought twice about his actions if he had been sanctioned two years ago? Probably.
After Tipperary won the All-Ireland last September Ryan was determined that his players wouldn’t lose the run of themselves. That their lap of honour would be controlled and dignified. Ryan had managed that as well as could possibly have been expected. A couple of weeks before the Cork game there was a minor incident at a charity Fun Run for which two players were forced to apologise to the squad but apart from that there had been no tremors, much less an earthquake. Until this.
On a parallel track, Tipp have problems in their full-back line. Nine different players were tried there during the League plus Sean O’Brien, who came on for his senior competitive debut against Clare a fortnight ago. Barrett would make a significant difference. But at what cost? Ryan needed all of his players to understand that if they were going to behave foolishly he was prepared to hit them with the ultimate sanction, regardless of their status. His decision to carry on without Barrett was absolutely right, whatever happens today.