In 2010, when Tipperary skidded into the qualifiers, they met in Horse and Jockey two days after Cork had blindsided them. Everybody in the room was obliged to speak and the tone of the meeting was mostly confessional. Declan Fanning, a Tipp selector now and a powerful presence in the dressing room then, admitted that he hadn’t been doing his gym work; Lar Corbett raised his hand for the same omission. And so it went, everybody sitting in a circle, the preferred configuration for group therapy.
And then Brendan Cummins rolled in a grenade. “There was plenty of talk but most of it was hot air,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I let it go as long as I could but I couldn’t hold my counsel all night. ‘We’re about as far away from winning an All-Ireland as Carlow are,’ I said.” Among other things he was disgusted by how many players had stayed in Cork drinking on the night of the game instead travelling home on the team bus and sticking together.
Two nights after that they trained in Semple stadium but the players were told to wait in the dressing room. Liam Sheedy, the Tipperary manager, walked in with a jar of honey and in the course of his speech he plunged his hand into the jar. His point was about immersion; how immersed were they in this? The walls were plastered with phrases that were supposed to define their life as a group but those words had become meaningless.
That summer Tipp’s qualifier campaign ended on the steps of the Hogan stand in September. How important were those meetings? They needed a spark; another beginning. “I’ve been at about 4,000 team meetings,” says Shane McGrath, the former Tipperary centre fielder. “They’re grand when you win. When you lose it’s like, ‘Why the hell did they bring us out to Horse and Jockey?’ A lot of the time there’d be more said in the car on the way home between three or four lads, stuff that should have been said in the meeting.
“Those meetings that year weren’t the be-all and end-all but they were definitely a factor. Lads needed to say a few things and get them off their chest. People were honest with each other which drove the following training sessions and got us going again.”
Advertisement
This year, after they lost to Cork, Tipp waited ten days to have a meeting. The headline outcome was the ejection of Cathal Barrett from the panel for disciplinary reasons. Was that a good meeting or a bad meeting? Like the 30-year rule on government papers the ins and outs of that meeting will be cold before they emerge.
The overall point is that Tipp have successfully managed qualifier runs from unpromising beginnings before. In 2014, when they lost at home to Limerick, the players were slaughtered for their post-match partying and that stink hung around for five weeks until they beat Galway in a storming qualifier match; that September they came within inches of beating Kilkenny.
“The key to the back door is players getting a chance to break into the team,” says Eoin Kelly. “As a squad player you’re saying, ‘I’ve a chance here now.’”
Michael Ryan made six changes for the first round of the qualifiers against Westmeath this year which carried echoes of 2010 when the team was shaken up for the first qualifier game against Wexford. On that occasion four players were dropped; among the changes were three championship debutants, including Patrick ‘Bonner’ Maher. Another feature of Tipp’s qualifier campaigns has been big-name casualties: Seamus Callanan was dropped in 2010, Conor O’Mahony in 2014, John McGrath and Noel McGrath have both been left out already in this qualifier run.
“I remember we were jittery enough against Wexford [in 2010],” says Kelly. “All we wanted was a home draw. Swing around to 2014, all we wanted was a home draw. We got Galway, the roughest draw, but it was at home. And Tipperary have got a favourable draw again this year.”
Advertisement
That was especially true in 2014 when they had Galway, Offaly and Dublin in Semple stadium before they ran a drag with Cork in Croke Park. By then the stigma of being a back-door team was obliterated by the momentum of being a winning back-door team.
The interesting pattern is that in 2010, 2014 and again this summer the key structural issues that Tipperary have been forced to address on the hoof have been in defence: Padraic Maher and Declan Fanning were tried at full-back in 2010 before they settled on Paul Curran; Maher had to be removed from full-back during the Galway game in 2014 and James Barry turned into an improvised solution that was working fine until recent weeks; now Tomas Hamill is at number three and the jury is still out.
Has the defence been sorted out yet? The evidence of the first half against Dublin would suggest not. On the whole, however, there were signs of recovery.
“When confidence is low everyone is trying to get their own confidence back,” says Kelly. “Everybody is more interested in hitting their own ball. In the Dublin game I could just see the players getting more united. With 71 or 72 minutes on the clock Bubbles could have taken his point but he laid it off to Seamus Callanan to make sure of the goal and you could see Seamus acknowledging him afterwards. That was a defining moment for me.”
“I think they’re only after getting their confidence back since the Dublin game,” says McGrath. “Dublin are poor but no matter who you beat when you put in a performance like that it’s a massive boost. Mentally Tipp are going to be a better place than Clare for next Saturday.”
Advertisement
Eight days before the Westmeath match the Tipp players let their hair down on a sanctioned night out in Athlone. Was that what they needed? When you win, significance is liable to pop up anywhere. They’re winning again.