Main menu:
Columnists > Bartizan
Dum Spiro Spero' Bartizan 27.07.07
Some fifty days of rain have passed since your columnist advised that Tipperary should follow the Blue Line - as the front runners in the London Marathon do - because that optimum route offers five matches for a title. As is often the case when we offer our thoughts as hostages, talk of Munster titles and uninterrupted progress proved to be mere words on the wind. Instead of the Blue Line, we seem set to emulate those Tyrone or Meath football teams whose championship games were into double figures when their seasons ended with those fateful steps into the stand to take Sam in hand.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Firstly, let us go back to the third installment of the Limerick saga.
With Tipperary a point down with a minute and a half of extra time to play, Seamus Hickey - who up until that point had been playing some great hurling, seemed to get a headstagger, revert to rugby and hand trip two Tipperary players in succession. For the second of these, all players, Limerick and Tipperary both, stop play after Lar Corbett goes airborne, and wait for the resultant equaliser. Enter the referee.
What does the bould Seánie McMahon do? Signals a free for the Corbett trip, but then waves play on. Limerick clear the ball, the soul goes out of Tipp, and only the margin of defeat is in question then. Mulcair made a prescient point in the forum in the preceding week where he said that whatever happened in Act III, a result would, as it were, result. Proof took form on the pitch in Limerick that day.
Can anyone seriously suggest that this was not a free? And before anyone talks about these things balancing out, that is tosh. This was the most crucial juncture of the whole
400-odd minutes, at a time when the Limerick backs were prepared to foul to prevent a goal, and the sole reason a free was not awarded was because of a potential fixture pileup?
I had a face on me after the game that was as red as a toaster element. In-can-fecking-descent I was. But Tipperary will have the last and the longest laugh; for verily, plagues shall be visiting the McMahon house in the County of Clare. When Seánie hears the frogs falling on his roof tiles, he will think of the Curse of Hud, an execration feared in the five parishes. By the time the locusts arrive, his living thoughts will be consumed by images of Lar's yellow helmet, flying through the ether like something at the airshow in Salthill.
But I digress.
Onto the qualifiers we went. Offaly up first. The only thing I will say in defence of Tipperary is that sheer heart got them over the line in Thurles that day. They moved like men mummified. The whole half-forward line looked to be entombed in concrete. They went 5 points down 10 minutes into the second half, but never let go until they won it. Eoin Kelly's point to put us ahead was luminous, otherworldly. Lar's goal was the cause of much relief; as the stand rose in acclamation, there seemed to be a feeling that this could be the makings of a young team. Tipp's record in the 5 championship games prior to Offaly - over this season and last - read LLDDL. We needed a W to end that sequence. And we got it. There were times when an L looked likely, and young Dooley could have made it a D if he elected to tap over late on, but W it was. A scribbly, lopsided W, but a blasted W all the same. We lost the best game of recent years - the 2002 All-Ireland semi-final - to Kilkenny (as if we need reminding), playing beautiful hurling. We lost by 4 points. We won against Offaly on Saturday by 4 points playing pure scutch. Which would I rather? That Offaly had the winning of the game on about 5 separate occasions only to screw it up was their own lookout. They have met Tipperary three times in qualifiers (in fact, three times in Championship over all time) and have lost all of them. But they are game young hurlers who will mature and will make better decisions. And while I am on the subject of referees, we in Tipp have reason to be grateful to Mick Haverty of Galway that day. The free count in our favour was frightening in the second half.
I was away for the Dublin game, over watching the start of the Tour de France in London. The texts I received from Parnell Park were intermittent but encouraging. After seeing the League game in Nenagh between these sides, I could not see how Dublin could come next nor near to closing the gap that existed between the sides that day. When the news came through that Dublin had gone ahead early in the second half, I texted back: "R U on drugs?!" Little did I know then that the only people using drugs were mounted on carbon frames, hurtling up and down the Embankment as we sat in Green Park watching giant screens and soaking up something called sunshine. Tipperary eventually closed out the deal, and in doing so, went into the final game of the series with morale in the county somewhere on the tepid side of lukewarm.
That Cork were the challengers did not seem to matter. The mantra went that we were losers both, that the game was on a Saturday, that it was a dead rubber, and so on. Meanwhile, on the discussion board, the contributor known as discostew gave the stay-at-homes some cold truth:
"I don't get this crap of people seeing it as a 'meaningless match'. I just wouldn't let them away with saying it. I won't even start on the people who are 'holding off' for the next match! There are 26 lads and a management team out there in all weather busting their arses for most of the year and having their jaws shattered, teeth knocked out, fingers fractured, hamstrings pulled, groins strained and ribs broken just so these lazy feckless so-called supporters can stay at home to 'wait for the next match'!"
He did offer a reprieve, however: "...you'd want to have had your leg pulled off in a savage combine harvester accident late in the afternoon to justify missing this match."
I felt I had to chime in to support my friend from The Simpsons with the rhinestone-encrusted leisure suit and the funky afro. It was a kind of clarion-from-the-walls-of-Jerusalem (but with a disco beat):
"Wide open spaces. A Tipp team revved up by talk of a hiding to nothing. A bunch of young lads coming in with unsung pedigrees and a point to prove. No Brian Murphy to straitjacket our Eoin. Seamus Butler in what might as well be his back yard. Lar hopping the wall to get in.
Cork missing their bulwark at 11. Tom Kenny nursing a hamstring. A scattering of young lads in their forwards. A sense amongst them that the job is done before the job has been done.
Remember poor Tommy Dunne's desperate lunge to prod the ball over the line in the Munster Final. Avenge that.
Remember Tommy's unavailing goals in a previous Munster Final - each one an exocet, the second coming when marshalled by Wayne Sherlock, then the best corner-back in Ireland, then one of the fastest men in shoe-leather. Do it for Tommy.
Do it for John Sheedy of 1984.
Do it for Paul Kelly plundering from midfield 2 years ago.
Do it for all the tumbling disappointments Tipp have endured to Cork for the last 16 years.
And consider, there are Minors playing for Tipp this year that were not born when Aidan Ryan's goal set the wheelchairs rolling. That have never seen Tipperary beat Cork in a Senior game.
That this is not Munster Championship is, as the fella says, not strictly germane. We will take what we can get.
So sit in the stand. Or stand in the stand. Covered. Uncovered. Come naked as a Wexford streaker for all I care. Just don't sit in an armchair, stewing in your own cynicism, listening to the mournful strains of Tipp FM.
Your only excuse, as discostew says, are those bloodied stumps sticking out of the back of a Klaas combine somewhere in a field in Templetuohy."
I went down by train, and to break the hex Cork have held over us, I decided not to face the way I was going, but to instead sit facing the rear of the train, trying to spook the gods. A couple of jeery, beery types spotted the Tipp jersey on me, and scoffed. I'll bet the same gauchos were sickened afterwards. I had a chat with the Ticket Inspector, a nice Cork lad, and I heard myself saying that getting within 10 points of that Cork team would be a result, and that a true display of Tipperary passion would be a tonic. He played the modesty card as well as all Cork people do. A couple of pints to stoke the adrenaline and the game is on.
And so we came to be in Thurles when Benny Dunne twisted the great Ronan Curran into a lúbán in the second half, when Willie Ryan was upended by The Rock but got up, threw the free over, and put 2 clear goals between the teams. The third Toome man in the starting forwards, young Devanney, battled all day too. But then, they all did. Eamon Corcoran's flick to Darragh Hickey was immense. We saw Daragh putting the ball over the bar against Cork in Senior Championship when he wasn't even on the panel a fortnight before! We had Hugh Moloney scavenging all over the field, making blocks, hooking, matching his partner Seamus Butler's points from play. John Carroll's wheeling point to put us 2 to the good nearly lifted the galvanise off the stand. When Ben O' Connor, in his unhappiest ever outing for Cork (how did they leave him at 11 for so long?), failed to get the line ball in flight, and the whistle blew, it was as if a corner had been turned. Tipperary was transcendent, and Cork, as ever, gracious in defeat.
Earlier this month, British forces in Iraq were forced to release a statement to the press denying rumours that they had released a plague of ferocious man-eating badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra. Evidently word had spread among the populace that British troops had introduced strange, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic. The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport. It later emerged that the creatures, several of which were killed by local farmers, were in fact honey badgers.
Well, if there were no man-eating badgers in Basra, there seemed to be plenty of them in evidence in Thurles on that Saturday. From the first time that the ball came into his corner, young Byrne from Shannon Rovers dinked it, claimed it, and drove it into the next parish. Declan Fanning - a man-eating badger if ever I saw one - was foursquare and safe against all assaults inside him. Eamonn Buckley denied Joe Deane space, time, oxygen, and another All-Star. Conor O' Mahony picked up where he left off against Offaly, fielding and fetching all day long.
What does this victory mean to Tipperary? It meant the following:
(i) Seeing sheer joy on the faces of the supporters. Seeing Toomevara clubmen and stalwarts like Neil Williams and Matt Hassett walking on air. Imagine what it meant to men like them, reared on tales of the "Wedger" Meagher, nourished on games against Christy Ring, walking back to their cars with Cork bet for the first time in a generation. I remember Benny Dunne acknowledging the influence of Neil Williams in a magazine article once, and to see Benny, after all the adversity this season, after all the firefighting he has been asked to do, come out with a performance like that, must have swelled the hearts of men like Neil Williams who have known him and Willie and Francie since they were reeling off their five times tables.
(ii) I took my nephew to the playbarn in Nenagh the following day. Tipperary jersies were many in number. As corny as it sounds, the night before we had allowed our kids to dream in blue and gold again.
(iii) Rocky's pub in Nenagh was clogged with happiness and porter. Every man in there had a smile stretched like a hammock across his face. It might not have been tropical outside, but inside, it was like a Bounty Bar ad come to life.
When Tony Blair bowed out of the House of Commons recently, he had these parting words to say:
"...I can pay the House the greatest compliment I can by saying that from first to last I never stopped fearing it and that tingling apprehension that I felt at three minutes to twelve today I felt as much 10 years ago and every bit as acute.
"It is in that fear that the respect is contained."
In an odd kind of way, that last sentence, about the nature of fear and respect, is applicable to Tipperary today. You might be wondering how I can shoehorn Tony into a column given over to Tipperary hurling, but bear with me. His words about the concepts of fear and respect resonated with me.
Where once there was a legitimate fear of Tipperary, a "tingling apprehension" (if not a knock-kneed palsy) now we barely maintain the vestiges of respect. Limerick showed us neither fear nor respect and nor did Offaly. Nor, indeed, should they have shown any, on all known form. For fear to exist again, we need to build that "tingling apprehension".
The Cork game may have been a signpost on the way back. Our form from the last 5 games now reads DLWWW. Speaking of all these W's and D's, we knew before the Cork game that those letters would be significant again in another sense. We needed nothing less than a "W", whereas either a "W" or a "D" would do for a Cork side that had a far better scoring aggregate. We knew that depending on what letter the hurling equivalent of the Scrabble cloth bag threw up, the team we faced would also begin with W and end with D: either Waterford or Wexford. And so it is that tomorrow sees us face off against Wexford for the first time since the replay of 2001. It was wet that day too, with a corner-forward from Cappawhite coming good. Let us hope that tomorrow sees more goals for us, and fewer of those heart-stopping moments that Wexford weave into every game - like Larry O's brace of goals and a couple of attempted points from their forwards that were wide only by the margin of Martin Storey's moustache.
I will sign off with a few words about the title of this column. "Dum Spiro Spero" is a Latin proverb that translates "While I breathe, I live". In other words, while Tipperary remain in this All-Ireland series, they still have a chance. The man-eating badgers are breathing yet.
Let us not return to our days as honey badgers.
_________________________________________________________
'As Peter Sellers Used To Say' Bartizan 13.6.07
Shuffling up the Ennis Road after the game, trying to make sense of my roiling thoughts on a boiling day, who did I see alongside me but the man with the most famous yellow sign in Ireland, Frank "John 3:7" Hogan. Born in Borrisokane, but reared in Limerick, Frank must have felt the passion of the occasion more than most of us. His message from the Gospel - "Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again" now applies to both teams. And although six days is a short gestation period for metaphorical rebirth, neither team lacks for motivation or fitness.
At the Field of Legends on a cooling Saturday evening, it will be especially hard to reach the same pitch of intensity again. Rematches tend to be played out on a plateau a little below the peak of the first game. For the first match, Richie Bennis had his Limerick team wound tighter than Superman's wristwatch, but this time, if you ask me (and he won't) Richie's team would do well to tone it down a little. Why? Because the self-same aggression that served Limerick so well in some respects also led to the concession of needless frees (Lucey's clatter on Willie Ryan being a particularly egregious example) and to the headstagger that did for Reale.
Watching "Reale Gone Kid" attempt to "do" Eoin Kelly first with a savage flake and then a dirty late chop, one could not help but think of the moaning and ollagóning heard on Shannonside since the All-Ireland Final of 1996 (better known in Limerick as the Battle of Gary Kirby's Finger). On that occasion, you'll remember, Liam Dunne's hurl connected with Kirby's hand going for a high ball, and since then it has been used in Limerick as an example of pre-meditated dirty play, most recently in the "Laochra Gael" programme on Liam Dunne. Now that Kirby himself is on the line as a selector, does he stand over Reale's actions (as his Uncle Richie implicitly did after the match)? Does he send out his men to rough up Tipp off the ball at every opportunity as Mike "Banger" O' Brien and Brian Geary did? The chop when it came was predictable enough: "Stop Kelly and you stop Tipp" was the clear subtext. Thankfully it did not come true. And though Reale should have seen a red card for the stroke, we are better to play Limerick with their full team.
Richie Bennis and Babs Keating crossed paths as players in the folkloric Munster Final of 1973 when Limerick were awarded a dubious last-minute free (now where have we seen that recently?), and as Richie stood over it, with the winning of the game in his hands, Babs apparently chanced a bet with him that he'd miss. Richie did not miss, and Limerick went on to close out the All-Ireland that year, their first since Mick Mackey captained the team to victory in 1940, and their last title to date. Conventional wisdom now has it that just as Babs lost that bet to Bennis, he lost the managerial bout to Bennis on Sunday last. As I see it, though, Tipperary played very well considering the enforced changes to the team. We were missing the 2 Pauls from Mullinahone, who were among our best 5 players of the last two years, as well as Paul Ormonde, who would surely wear 4 on his back if he was fit for any more than watercarrying duties at present. With our pack stripped of colour cards it meant that Babs was forced to shuffle what was left, and introduce a joker in the form of Liam Cahill. Then our ace has an off-day (but what an off-day, when both points from play were things of beauty, the second in particular a tonic to the team). And still we score 1-19, with the half-forwards all weighing in with good, self-won, scores.
I watched the Tipp-Limerick game again on Setanta on Monday evening. My poor sainted wife was approaching apoplexy as a result. I now stand accused of:
(a) Going to the game (this also involved a Saturday night in Limerick)
(b) Getting home just in time to see "The Sunday Game" thereby taking command of the Sunday night schedule. (As much as Spillane's goofy grandstanding gives me a pain in my fundament, ER sucks lemons since me man lost his arm to the helicopter blade).
(c) Coming home early on Monday evening to see the game again.
The commentator on Setanta is a good bit of stuff. Not showy, not frantic, but well-briefed and well-resourced. He struck you as a fella that actually lives and loves the game of hurling, unlike another commentator whose name rhymes with Dec Fanning. So, for instance, The Man From Setanta was able to tell us that Pa Bourke was coming off a dose of flu the previous week, which was news to me, that Conor O' Mahony is related by marriage to a man on the Limerick team, and so on. And none of this comment was gratuitous in the manner of other commentators. He also illuminated the little grace notes in the game that are best viewed after the fact - Benny's flick off a Limerick hurl in the first half and Diarmaid Fitzgerald's blessed hook on Barry Foley. It was pleasing to see - late on - the icy Tipperary blood needed not to foul Donie Ryan when he meandered around the pitch like a mating swallow, ducking into contact and looking to draw the foul. Then there was Eoin Kelly's second point. If you look at it again, have a scance at the angle of the stick when the ball leaves it; Gandalf's wand wouldn't be in it. That point halted Limerick momentum at a critical time, and meant that Tipp were never led late on. In that sense, Sunday was a triumph - we did not allow Limerick to get a Galway-type gallop up.
It was a great struggle, and in the immediate aftermath of the game, I thought that Limerick were haunted to get a draw. But in fairness, they dug very deep, and they need a win so badly. Not to have won since before 9/11, as one of them put it, leaves them aching for validation. Plusses for Tipp were the lads at midfield, the performance of our starting half-forwards who all scored in the first half, and especially the return of Big John, looking less big than before in actual fact. Lar made a difference, and we were fierce accurate all through. Minus points to Benny who was too loose (and a touch unlucky more than once), to a couple of lazy strikes from Tippmen in good possession, and to the referee for the desperate decision against Webster that led to the Limerick goal. At the time I cursed Kirwan for myself, for my missing brothers, for Tipperary, and for just about anyone listening. But on a reviewing, he did a very good job, that apart, and is as entitled to a genuine error after 70 minutes hard running on a hot day as any other one of the 30 men out on the pitch.
I think we can win the replay on Bloomsday. Let us hope that our Saturday ends, as Molly Bloom's day does in the final chapter of "Ulysses" - with a resounding "Yes". I'm not sure whether Frank Hogan would apreciate me starting this piece with an Evangelist, and ending it with Joyce, but sure, it's all part of life's rich pageant, as Peter Sellers used to say.
Here's to further reborn pageantry in Thurles.
___________________________________________________
'The Blue Line' Bartizan 6.06.07
First off, let me take you down a little sociological sidetrack. For the game against Dublin in the League, I drove to Nenagh from New Ross via Kilkenny, taking in a fair swathe of hurling heartland. There was a game on in Inistioge as I passed, with a clatter of cars and children at the venue. So far, so Sunday morning.
It was a day when one thanked oneself for easing up on the ale the previous night. Italianite sunshine sluiced the seemingly endless roads of South Kilkenny; roads that looped like question marks and made serious demands on my recently fractured gearing arm. But as lovely as the views were, they were fleeting, as each mile brought another in a series of humpbacked bridges; each mile spawned black and amber chevrons announcing an elbow in the road ahead. For a sporting mind attuned to symbol, the black and amber chevrons and the endless obstacles in my path seemed pretty self-explanatory. Anyhow, I eventually left Kilkenny, and, for joy, entered Tipperary. The gearbox could breathe again. But the semiotic charge of road signs would not let up.
It may be a sign of madness in an adult, but I admit to a leap of the heart every single time I see a "Welcome to Tipperary" sign. Indeed one of the few bonuses of endless time spent in an Expressway Bus during my college years (fleet-footed red setter, how are ya?) was that despite our glacial progress through Monasterevin, despite the pointless stopover in the pointless village of Borris-in-Ossory, despite the three hours of my life I would never get back, the N7 to Nenagh always provided the chance to enter Tipperary not once, but twice. The fact that one leaves Offaly almost as soon as entering it is of course a happy corrolary. The new stretch of motorway from Castletown to Nenagh may interfere with my felicity - I must study the map of the proposed route.
But back to my journey. For company I had Marian Finucane on the radio. And the one thing that amused me even more than the chattering classes on Marian's show was a handpainted sign on the road outside Two-Mile Borris:
Poker Game
Littleton
Good Friday
No more information was provided regarding time, prizes, or poker format. But then, if you needed to be told more, you were unlikely to scoop the pot. Those five words told a lot about the changes that have taken place in Tipperary over our lifetimes. Good Friday used to be a day when any form of leisure was scorned. But to indulge the devil's diversion that was poker? You might as well wrap your soul in brown paper and send it to Satan directly.
Good Friday was a singularly black day to be a child: the endless round of church ceremonies in the afternoon and the overwhelming guilt of the gospel. I can't have been the only child who wondered what was "Good" about that Friday. Hearing the local townspeople in church that afternoon shouting "Barrabas, Barrabas" and "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" - and in a Nenagh accent as well - were strange cameos that no amount of repetition could clarify for me. All that and smoked haddock too. If they never, ever again take another haddock from the salty Atlantic, it will still be too soon for me.
Now, as the five-word sign at Two-Mile Borris signalled, anything goes on Good Friday, including poker games in rural Tipperary. I am not one who laments for the Days of Knocknagow but we have travelled a long road from Father Hannigan's sermons to all-day house parties on Good Friday where the calling card is a slab of Bud or Miller. But there you are.
Back to the hurling before this piece turns into an AA Roadwatch report or an article in "Sociology Today"...
On I drove through a changed Tipperary to a much changed Tipperary team in McDonagh Park. Three debutants, all eagerly awaited, one in each sector of the field. At the back a stalwart of the unlucky crop of under-21s from last year, Conor O' Brien of Annacarthy. Centrefield featured a Stapleton from Templederry, good stock with a sturdy minor pedigree. Up front, we wondered if we might unearth a new rock of Cashel in the half-forwards in the person of Ryan O' Dwyer. Babs had made much play that week about Tipperary hurling being in dire straits unless the young lads were given their chance, and to be fair, youth was having its fling here. The average age of the starting fifteen was closer to 23 than 24; Brendan Cummins was the only player on the team over 30 years of age. They were faced by a Dublin team that was equally young or perhaps younger, but depleted by injury and punctured somewhat by a midweek chastening in Casement Park. A sizeable number of Dublin fans had covered the 100 miles to Nenagh without the mishaps that befell the football bandwagon when The Dubs visited Thurles a couple of years ago. And they too got to enter the ever-accomodating Tipperary twice as well...
MacDonagh Park was pretty blowy judging by the ruffling Tricolour, and the sod seemed set for a decent bounce. Tipp got the advantage of the first half breeze, and in a trice had a couple of points to their account. It soon became obvious that Dublin were drained by their two games in the previous week, and had no answer to something like Pa Bourke's economy in picking up and striking over the bar with the lowest of trajectories. Nor had they the heft implied in John Carroll's bamboozling shoulder out near the sideline.
Tipp had a few swift and coltish hurlers in Maloney, McGrath and Stapleton. Maloney, in particular, impressed with his ability to deliver Exocets to the inside forwards, one of which resulted in a snappy goal. It will be hard luck on him if he is squeezed out of a starting spot when Fitz and Corcoran come back. If we have 8 better, hungrier hurlers filling the jersies from 2-9, then we have a good shot at a title this year. In a funny way, the Wrestlemania goal he conceded to Damien Hayes has probably done him a favour. He gets tighter now, is stronger and more assertive on the ball, and is nearly passing himself out trying to strike that particular WWF image from his legacy. On his home pitch, there were few better players, though his counterpart from the North Division, a Bernard Dunne as tenacious as his boxing namesake, riddled his man and scored the point of the day, a boomer from 70 yards to add to those he scored in earlier rounds of the League.
Daragh Egan had an unhappy game at 11. His pace off the mark is very suspect, and his ability to win clean ball is unproven at this level. But maybe we are too fast to open the Tipperary trapdoor. Perhaps we should take a leaf from Richie Bennis' book, for it was the wily Richie - whom we will see up close on June 10th - who said, in the wash of a few indifferent performances by his Number 11 in the early rounds of the League, that Ollie Moran was his centre-forward for the championship, and that was that. Babs is obviously of the same mind regarding Egan: bed him in, and give him the confidence to develop. And let's face it, what Babs and John Leahy don't know about playing in the wing-forward line could be safely etched on the back of a Penny Black. One thing that certainly impressed me about Egan was how he has been shedding the pounds since the Fitzgibbon; O' Hanlon and Carroll too. I think we will be seeing a leaner, meaner Tipp this season, and for that Brian Murray must take a bow.
Lar was abysmal when he came on. His inability to strike cleanly on the run, off his right, came back to haunt him. Sometimes when watching Lar you wonder if the two points he scored in the second half of the 2001 All-Ireland Final were in fact mirages. But to be fair to Lar, he again found his range in the game against Waterford in scoring a few cracking points to reel in a substantial half-time lead. A wing-forward who weighs in with a few points a game has been rare currency in Tipperary of late - John O' Brien, to be fair to him, was coming into himself in that regard before the accident - and if Lar's hamstring holds, he will be a massive boon to the team.
As our League skidded to a stop against Waterford, who among us did not feel that giddy spineshiver that announces the Championship is almost upon us? Every year brings hope. Although the tradition of our "Divine Right" is lapsing quicker than Good Friday in Littleton, there is always, as the songwriter says, "a siren singing us to shipwreck". In the Greek tale, you'll remember, the songs of the sirens were Ulysses' undoing. His sailors, worried by womanly wiles, plugged their ears with wax and so were saved from temptation. This has been a pre-season in Tipperary when plugging one's ears with wax seemed a capital notion. Rumours have swirled around the county: lurid, technicolour rumours of rows and dismissals, apparently scripted by Tarantino. It was like Lannigan's Ball for a while there with fellas stepping out and fellas stepping in again. But here we are with June upon us and fifteen fit men will face Limerick at their home in McManus Manor, sorry, Páirc na nGael.
Going into the new championship campaign it seemed that our best hope of success was that our corner-forwards - The Kelly Gang - continued to shoot straight and true, like their forbears from Moyglass near Killenaule who made their fame and fortune in the Australian bush. Paul in particular had been pin-sharp in the League campaign and if he had continued to snaffle goals at that impressive rate, would take some of the scoring burden off his brother. Now we hear he has a troubled quad, and it might be Pa in that corner instead. Not a bad swap, maybe.
So, what of our prospects for 2007?
This is a year when Tipperary might usefully run The Blue Line. Let me explain. In the London Marathon, there is a continuous blue line, a couple of centimetres wide, running the length of the 26-odd miles. It shows the front runners the optimum path. Follow that and the inches you shave off save you time and effort. It might spare you from coming undone - as many men have - on Tower Bridge at the halfway point. If forced to run from the middle of the pack, the blue line becomes blurred and almost invisible after the tramping of your opponents. And that is why a Munster win this year is paramount. Not because a Munster title is inviolable, or because Tipperary has measured itself using Munster titles for so long - although these too are valid if diminishing arguments - but because winning Munster for the first time since 2001 means a couple of things - that we are halfway there with 2 wins from 4, and that no-one has gone ahead of us, smudging our sight of the blue line.
So, if we justify favouritism and beat the Shannonsiders, what will await us? Cork, as things currently stand, are a bit light in defence after meeting Clare at Schemozzle Stadium. The wallet favours Waterford in their match-up in 10 days' time. Which brings one to an interesting point. Does the current run of Waterford wins over Tipperary qualify as a hoodoo? To those raised on Tipperary supremacy over their neighbours, it is certainly a bit of a "how-do" at least. Well done to them on their League win, while we're on the subject. That image on television of the middle-aged man from Waterford dancing up and down in the stand at the final whistle, oblivious and delirious, was a lovely one. Hurling plays a lovely tune some days.
I also liked the honesty of Ken McGrath on the radio with his simple refrain: "We were fed up of losing". The good thing for Waterford people is that the players now realise that sentiment means nothing in September. Tipperary too is "fed up of losing". As I sign off on this piece on the Wednesday before the Munster semi-final, the team named after training last night shows Babs has been true to his mantra about youth before the Dublin game in March. The tantalising prize ahead of us is a third Munster Final appearance in a row. All thoughts of dancing men from Waterford or black and amber chevrons are for other days. All eyes on the Blue Line now.
Bartizan