Tipperary Hurling Tipperary GAA Premierview

The Killinan End

6th June 2008

“Adeste Fidelis”

O Come All Ye Faithful

The greatest choral call to assembly that mankind has ever heard. A Tipp/Cork Munster Championship game demands such a hymn. Such is the pageantry, such is the occasion.

If you wanted to choose a fitting come back gig after the Stalingrad that was our Quarter Final capitulation to Wexford, this would be it. Hurling Big Top style. Another chapter in the storied rivalry to be carved out.

The swaggering gunslinger has departed stage left. The restoration ended in farce and acrimony, nothing typified the state of affairs more than the gunfire exchanged via newspaper columns and radio phone in shows between Babs Keating and the jewel of his team; Eoin Kelly. A train wreck of a season tempered only by the unprecedented number of debutantes that Babs brought on; which was to be the enduing legacy of his two year career.

In the place of the gunslinger comes the quiet man. Liam Sheedy.

His name had bubbled along the Tipperary hurling horizon without it ever becoming lit up in lights. He bears a surname indelibly linked with the heartbreak of the Centenary Munster Final. His underage career was productive. He was part of the graduating Under 21 classes of 1989 and 1990. A rich enough crop we got out of those teams; Conal Bonnar, “The Church” Ryan, Declan Ryan and John Leahy. Sheedy played in two All Ireland Under 21 Finals, victorious in the 1989 decider.

And then he disappeared from the main stage so to speak, his senior inter county career resuscitated in the aftermath of the defeat to Clare in the 1997 Munster Final. Sheedy and wunderkind Eugene O’Neill were spirited in by Len Gaynor for Tipperary’s first ever back door game versus Down in Clones. He saw service in that year’s All Ireland and closed out the decade by featuring at corner back in the two tussles against Clare in Cork in 1999.

Liam Sheedy’s solid but hardly stellar inter county playing career didn’t at first light show management pedigree. 2006 was to change all that. Sheedy managed a precocious Tipperary minor team to All Ireland honours denying the prodigious Joe Canning parity with Jimmy Doyle’s three medal haul. There was a rousing win over Kilkenny in the Semi Final that year too. Sheedy’s minors were as complete a package as we sent out in many a year, particularly proficient in attack and capable of playing an open brand of hurling with a dash and a verve that doffed the cap to no opponent. To leave defeat in a Munster Final behind them, they took out Kilkenny and Galway both hotly fancied at the time. It was no mean feat.

The 2006 Minor win was a serious tonic for a hurling county that had slipped down the rankings as the Noughties progressed. Year after year we listened to County Convention reports pointing to the lack of progress at Minor and Under 21 level. The ten year itch had been sated under Sheedy; he had done the County some service.

And then he took his curtain call and departed the scene. The place was left in good shape, and there had to be some vicarious satisfaction for him in seeing Declan Ryan and Tommy Dunne deliver another Irish Press Cup in 2007.

In tandem with the rising tide for our Minor teams was the dying days of Babs Keating’s second coming as Tipperary Manager. Last year ended in no small amount of rancour and disharmony. It has since been acknowledged, fairly I would add, that the three game shoot-out with Limerick was a form of Russian Roulette. The losing party to that trilogy was always at risk of being on a hiding to nothing. The qualifier route punished us with an unrelenting sequence of fixtures. Cracks were appearing, Offaly (in possibly their weakest state of hurling health since the mid 1960s) got far too close for comfort, the trip to Parnell Park saw Eoin Kelly and Paul Curran injured (the former injury to prove to be more controversial than anything else that happened in Babs Keating’s two year reign). And then there was the brief glimpse of hope in the shape of a Saturday evening win against Cork in front of an attendance that would have shamed the County Board had a comparably small crowd showed up at a Senior County Final.

And then there was Wexford.

Deus Misereatur

To mutilate Simon and Garfunkel: “Where have you gone Nicky English, our Nation turns it’s lonely eyes to you…..”

After the fall came the succession issue. It was a case of round up the usual suspects. For a time all the talk was of a second restoration, this time Nicky English’s name was being whispered with the sort of reverence that one Maradona goal and three decades of stellar service to the Blue and Gold, can buy you for the rest of your life. A backroom dream team laden with cult Tipperary figures such as Skippy Cleary, Donie O’Connell and Bobby Ryan was also spoken about.

It came to nought.

Enter the quiet man. Liam Sheedy’s eventual appointment was as low-key as Babs’s reappointment two years previous was high-octane. Sheedy went about his business with quiet resolve. We got more than a glimpse of what life would be like in the future, when we saw the back room men he appointed.

No body can be quite sure who wrote Adestes Fideles. The guy who is credited with writing it wasn’t so sure himself. Handel reckoned it was stolen from him; there is a school of thought that says that the returning knights from the Crusade first sang it. Given its strong Jacobite links it’s as likely to have been written in Upperchurch-Drombane as any where else.

Upperchurch-Drombane has produced some truly remarkable people. Eamon O’Dhuibhir aka “Ned O’ the Hill” the great Jacobite and Raparee, Patrick Kinane remarkably elected a TD for Clann Na Pobhlachta, and one Michael Ryan aka the “Church”. An ungainly locking corner back who stormed to national prominence with a performance in the Munster Finals of 1991 that was straight of out of the Hell’s Kitchen playbook. With Mick Ryan in tow Sheedy had some serious grit in reserve, his next call-up was equally telling.

Anyone who has ever studied Economics in the hallowed and buckfast stained halls of UCG will leave their Alma Mater with three mind-numbing memories of boredom. Professor Michael Cuddy and his continual lament over Sean Lemass’s rape of the Galway-Clifden Railway line and the fact that somewhere in deepest Kenya, a train is trundling over tracks that once traversed Connemara. If you had to suffer Dr Michael Keane’s first year Applied Economics class every time you hear the words “aluminium industry” you are brought back to forty minutes of twice weekly paint-drying.

However if it’s a comparative study of mental health provision between North/West Roscommon and South Roscommon, then Dr Eamon O’Shea is your man.

Eamon O’Shea is what they call a Gerontologist. He studies the economics of welfare provision and care for the elderly. A strange road-turn his life has taken since the days of red cards in League matches when the customary Kilruane fire came to the fore. When this columnist heard of O’Shea’s appointment my attention was immediately captured. The academic’s aptitude for detail and analysis allied to the fire of the Eamon O’Shea of the hurling past could be a great combination for Tipp hurling.

All promising stuff so far.

I’m not sure what you make of the Waterford Crystal tournament, it’s really a bit of harmless foreplay before the main action takes place. Perhaps in time its reputation will follow in the direction of it’s sponsor’s share price. Who knows?

We won it in any event however well it ranks in terms of achievement. One telling statistic would be though, that the said Crystal tournament was the first real marker that Nicky English was on to something back in the very early moments of his team’s ascent to greatness.

Of more estimable form value perhaps were the opening skirmishes of the National Hurling League.

Opening day in the Stadium brought Clareen’s finest in his new role but shorn of the Birr contingent. 4 Killenaule men started that day, not bad for a club long sneered at for being “on the wrong side of the bricquette factory railway track” After a scuttery enough start we got things going and Offaly were dispatched with little ceremony.

Next up were Limerick in our debut game in front of the TG4 cameras for 2008 and little shoots of growth were beginning to spurt. The Kelly/Corbett axis of attack looked a serious upgrade on 2007. It was the real comeback day performance for the Boy Wonder as he handed the Limerick defence a real lesson. Another little walk-on act turned quite a few heads when a young man from Drom by the name of Callinan, bould as a bull-calf, came off the bench and pilfered a goal and a point without much ado. Where Kelly was a case of rehabilitation, Callinan was a pure sign that Sheedy had the cojones to work with new material.

Next up we were back up to the seaside of Salthill, a renewal of Tipp and Galway a notoriously different League fixture to predict. Loughnane’s drum beating was starting early in 2008 and the talking heads were murmuring that Galway would be a bridge too far Sheedy’s work in progress.

This was a difficult but ultimately productive day at the office. Down to 14 men and shorn early on of the exciting prospect of Hugh Moloney at centre forward, we managed to eke out a draw in the type of game that in previous years we would have folded in.

The bubble took a little jolt as we headed back to the scene (many many years ago now) of the Under 21 game that has since been christened “The Menace in Ennis”. Again we had a little speed wobble letting the Banner back in to it after being four or so points up in the dying minutes of the game. But yet more nuggets of promise to be gleaned here. James Woodlock contributed handsomely with 0-3 and then there was Shane McGrath posting early notice that this could be his year to flourish.

Then came Laois who are in the sort of hurling neverland that you’d hope to never experience at first hand. Five rounds, three wins, two draws. No defeats.

All through out the unbeaten group stage run, Liam Sheedy never departed from his quiet man routine. Keeping expectations measured he kept things on an even keel. Two things he said at this point in the year impressed me a lot.

Firstly his acknowledgement of a debt to Babs for blooding so many guys the year before coupled with his polite refusal to “diss” Babs’s fate last year.

Secondly the notion that his primary objective was to have “two guys fighting for every position”. This was an admirable ambition and a sign that the times were a ‘changing.

If the road travelled by this Tipperary team leads all the way to Croke Park and September; then the formative part of that journey will have been the two successive Sundays spent in the trenches of Nowlan Park back in the Spring.

A heavy toll was paid in terms of injuries sustained when last we faced Waterford in a League game in Nowlan Park. Evidence that Tipperary would no longer be the sort of team that gets sand kicked in its eyes was served in two telling extracts of play in the early stages of the National Hurling League Quarter Final of this year. The game was hardly on when Ryan O’Dwyer’s introductory pleasantries to Ken McGrath ended with the Waterford centre back breaking his hurley off the hardy Cashel man’s back. Little brother Eoin McGrath spied an opportunity to follow through on Eamon Corcoran as the Templemore man lost footing only to be checked by a posse of hombres led by Sheriff Shane McGrath.

Yes, I thought at last we have a team that’s like John Wayne toilet paper.

“Rough, Tough and takes no shit from injuns”

We took things to the max in the first half that day, Seamie Butler’s goal, Corcoran’s majesty from the sideline cut, and through it all there was Ryan O’Dwyer and his honest toil.

The second half ended in direct contrast to the Clare game, instead of folding, we absorbed what Waterford could throw at us and drove on for the win.

For Shane McGrath it was possibly his best day yet in a Tipperary jersey.

Plenty more where than came from:- Tibi sit Gloria

The second day out Noreside was an even more enjoyable Sunday jaunt. Barrie Henriques playing to the gallery with magnificent pomposity in his role as Chief-Jester to the Court of King Brian told us to spare the petrol money. He may have been pandering to the “ate-‘em- raw” constituency of Kilkenny GAA follower, but there was more than a hint of betrayal of what our Noreside friends really think of the present state of Tipperary Hurling in Barrie’s words. The view being that the arse had fallen out of Tipperary hurling.

We had some great nuggets to devour from Sir Barrie:-

From the predictable “Kilkenny are light years ahead of the rest” to words for the Foundation level Kilkenny supporter you had:“we’ll bate ‘em back to Gortnahoe.”

But in order to show the world and it’s mother that Barrie’s tongue was not firmly in his cheek but was in fact rammed tightly up Brian Cody’s arse we had the following piece of prose:-

Will Kilkenny win on Sunday? No doubt, and if you want reasons for my forecast, I’ll give you twenty good reasons, and I’ll be very fair, you can pick any fifteen of them. So to start with my twenty reasons, here we go: James McGarry, Michael Kavanagh, Jackie Tyrrell, JJ Delaney, PJ Delaney, Tommy Walsh…..Need I go any further?

Signing off, and obviously in need of immediate relief he advised us all to

“Enjoy the Result”.

Thanks Barrie, that’s exactly what we did.





Onto a National Final, albeit a League Decider. We faced Galway again, and this time the build-up was that bit more raunchy, given the arrival of Joe Canning to the sainted ranks of Galway senior inter county hurling.

The result was the first piece of silverware since 2001. For the record those deserving of plaudits included Paul Curran, Conor O’Mahony, the mighty Shane McGrath, The Boy Wonder and Seamus Butler a guy who showed he is a real class act that day, he has taken his blows over the years but has never given up and the League title win of 2008 has his name written all over it.

It was arguably not as heady a day as the wins Noreside, but it was that bit more significant. Early vindication for Sheedy’s management to date, and then predictably Sheedy emerged from the winner’s enclosures calming people down and assuring all and sundry that really all Tipperary had arrived was Base Camp.

Base Camp indeed, but it’s a damned sight better than last year’s Ground Zero.

I see us facing into a mighty challenge on Sunday and for three distinct reasons.

1. The hand of history. Records are I accept there to be broken, and the whole “not since 1923” thing is some what overstated when you factor in that it wasn’t as if we played Cork in Cork every second championship year, or anything close. But that said it’s still a source of comfort for Cork. It’s something extra they have to fight to the death to defend and when the fat is really in fire next Sunday it may be a factor that will motivate some of their more cerebral players such as Cusack and O’hAlpin to greater heights.

2. The strike. You go through something like that with a bunch of guys and two things happen to you in most cases. The shutters go up and the group become galvanised. These guys have a hell of a lot to lose on Sunday if things go t*ts up, they’ve been indulged by their people in their industrial relations pique and you can only throw the soother out of the pram so often. Its time for them to deliver.

3. Whilst Nowlan Park was great (twice over) and the whole League win really put the lead back in our pencils, the Championship is a fair notch higher than anything we have faced before this year. I know that’s the type of cliché that sends one clambering for the delete button, but it is the truth. We are asking our boys to summon a better and stronger performance then in any of the eight competitive fixtures they have had under Liam Sheedy so far. There is still a sense of the unknown about how Sheedy’s team will adapt to what’s thrown at them in the Championship. It’s a debut game, the new Jerusalem has to be started some where, but lets be honest and accept that we are really going into uncharted waters from 2.15pm onwards on Sunday. Cork admittedly have their debutantes as well.




So much for the psycho-analysis, the team sheet analysis is worthy of some passing comment. No place in the starting for our sole All Star of 2007. More of a commentary about how well the full back line has thrived led by Paul Curran than it is a criticism of anything Declan Fanning has done wrong. In fact having him in reserve tempers the nerves in respect of Buckley and O’Brien if either were to do off-key on Sunday.

Conor O’Mahony has improved a lot and is thriving under new management. He has a debutante on him on Sunday and not the pesky Niall McCarthy who did for us in Killarney in 2004. Sunday is a day of real provenance for Conor; it’s hard to see us get through this one if he doesn’t deliver. I’m confident he will.

Signs are on it that the Woodlock to half forward line experiment may be over. Two sets of grafters and hard-yard merchants face off against each other. If the midfield pattern on Sunday follows the openness we saw last year in Thurles, it may be a great day for Shane McGrath’s type of game. There was so much space that day in Thurles, maybe it will follow suit on Sunday. We’ve often managed at worst to break even with Cork in this sector so the same should follow on Sunday.

Cork-Tipp clashes of the past have often thrown up outstanding individual performances from centre-field. Teddy McCarthy in 1987, Paul Kelly in 2005 to name but two.

A sobering thought though; one day Shane McGrath’s Duracells won’t be at full tilt, lets hope it’s not Sunday. In many ways he has become the platform to build a win; with his rising performance levels his importance to the overall team has soared. He in many ways encapsulates the traditional old time values of Tipperary hurling, shoulders back and flake away. A smashing young hurler who is a credit to his parish and to his seed and breed. Good luck to you, Young McGrath, go out and show the Blackrock End what a modern day Thady Quill looks and hurls like.

The major talking point will be the half forward line; the source of so much furrowing of brows. Seamus Callinan takes the centre forward berth on paper at least. Remember again last year. We turned Cork over and over and over again on the forty in Thurles. Lar and Benny did some hurling there. The experience of last year should be salutary for the three boys who line out there on Sunday; show them that tape and how the mighty Cork half back line were made small boys out of in Thurles.

Inside line picks itself on form. In the last line of analysis we need to be economical here and merciless in execution. I noticed the aforementioned Gerontologist taking the forwards for target shooting from the sideline as a warm up drill before a few of the League games. No harm to see that.

I would add in caution that Sully and Brian Murphy are well capable of delivering Exocet missile type passes from lost Tipperary possession. On the other hand the Tipp attack has the great advantage of reserves; Johnno, Festy, Webster. All potential game turners.

Cork of course have the ace in Joe Deane and astute and wily old Gerald has not played that ace in his opening hand.




This one could and should go the full fifteen rounds, I read recently Cusack quoting the great line of Terence McSwiney.

“It is not those who inflict the most but those who endure the most who will conquer in the end”

He is dead right, and anyone who would take Cusack for a fool is “fair tick” as they say in Thurles.

I can see history on the horizon on Sunday; but It’s not 1923, it’s 1991. I sense the real prospect of a draw and the matter remaining to be settled the following Sunday in the Stadium

Post Scriptum

On Sunday let’s not forget a certain trio we’ve lost recently. Pat Stakelum one of the greatest Tipperary hurlers of all time, an All Ireland winning captain and a man who dedicated his life to the game of hurling and in particular to it’s promotion with the youth of Thurles.

Darrel Darcy tragically taken in his prime and whilst his career in the Blue and Gold was in its early flourish.

Michael “Spike” Nolan. A legend and a gentleman. It’s going to be so poignant on Sunday not to see him alongside John Costigan and Hotpoint in the Tipp dugout with his baseball cap.

Dia, dean trocaire orthú.

GMB.