IN ALL FAIRNESS - Tough decisions have to be made

There is no point in sugar-coating it, 2022 has been a disaster of a year for the Tipperary senior hurling team.

I don’t think the management, players and county board could be in any way defensive if they didn’t accept this as a statement of fact, and it might get worse yet.

They could have the ignominy of playing in a relegation playoff if Kerry were to win the MacDonagh Cup, and while it would be felt that Tipperary would comfortably come through such a tie, I wouldn’t be so sure as this is Tipperary panel devoid of confidence after their brusing Munster campaign, the pressure of that game might be too much for some.

Hopefully, common sense prevails and if Kerry were to win the MacDonagh Cup, they are brought into the Munster championship as the sixth team, rather than this ludicrous situation of a promotion/relegation playoff, admittedly brought about by the likes of Tipperary and their other four Munster hurling behemoths who wanted security in the round-robin format from relegation.

However, in all honesty, if Tipperary were to lose a playoff to Kerry, would you foresee a 2023 Munster Championship without Tipperary, I seriously doubt it! However, this debate could well be mute and is currently unfair on a Kerry side that have a game to win against Antrim on Saturday week.

But back to local matters, we all knew this year had the potential to be a difficult one, with a new manager coming in always is, particularly replacing an All-Ireland winning manager Liam Sheedy, who for all his critics, did win a second All-Ireland in his second coming, and that should never be questioned in any way, regardless of who Tipp did or did not beat in 2019.

There was frustration that they did not kick on in 2020 or 2021 and there was a feeling of a natural ending last year to Sheedy’s reign when the youthful and energetic Limerick and Waterford sides brought our championship ambitions to a shuddering halt.

The Covid years were a disaster for Tipperary. You might say it was the same for everyone but if there were round-robin campaigns in 2020 and 2021, more of the under 20/21 crop from those All-Ireland teams would have been blooded and Colm Bonnar would have been in a better situation.

Go back to 2019, the likes of Jake Morris, Mark Kehoe, Jerome Cahill, Ger Browne were making an impact off the bench in that All-Ireland success. The next target would have been for them to push for starting berths in 2020, but that never happened, apart from Morris, and until this year for Kehoe, Browne and a few more in Craig Morgan, Dillon Quirke and Conor Stakelum who were the few bright sparks in the campaign.

Rightly or wrongly, Liam Sheedy opted to go with his trusted hand in those shortened championships, but the 2-time All-Ireland winning manager is no fool, if he felt those younger players were ready to play a more prominent role, more of them would have appeared. However, we are where we are now.

Colm Bonnar is as pure a Tipperary hurling man as they come. If you cut him open, he’d probably bleed blue and gold. He wasn’t first choice to succeed Liam Sheedy, he admitted as much himself, and knowing he was very much the fall-back candidate after Liam Cahill rejected the offer to come home, one thing you would never worry about with Bonnar is his pride being hurt, and it was a dream to become Tipperary manager.

The Cashel native said all the right things after he came in and was a throw-back to traditional Tipperary values of hard work and pride in the jersey, as well as the revival of the Miller Shield to help discover new talent, but from talking to two prominent former Tipperary players, this was a red flag for them straight away.

Those trials yielded little and were more a sop to get the die-hards on side, when instead Tipperary should have already been training for the new campaign. There might be a closed season for training until 8th December, but we all know that is being breached, and Tipperary abided by the rules. In the GAA, rules are broken daily, and Tipperary need to get with the times, and certainly against Cork, it highlighted how off the pace the team were in terms of elite championship fitness, not having the sharpness to stay with teams, and then falling away in the closing stages such as against Limerick.

Colm Bonnar has also been a luckless manager. When he was officially appointed on 8th September last, only Brendan Maher was not going to be part of his plans as he had already retired. However, since then it has been one blow after another, Niall O’Meara taking a year out, two of the counties brightest young talents in Bryan O’Mara and Ciaran Connolly not committing as they planned to go on J1’s for the summer, falling to Kerry in the first competitive game and in the process losing Willie Connors for the year through injury. Then the hammer blow of Padraic Maher’s enforced retirement. No other player commands the respect Maher does and his loss in the dressing room has been immeasurable. On top of that came injuries to John O’Dwyer, Seamus Callanan who never pucked a ball in championship, while John McGrath barely played thirty minutes total in the championship before his season ending injury. If Colm Bonnar had ducks, they would have probably drowned.

However, that doesn’t absolve him from responsibility of a Tipperary team being so disjointed on the field. The strategy in the league of focusing on giving as many players as possible game-time rather than start putting a fifteen together wasn’t the right one. Players needed to be under pressure to complete for a place right from the start, rather than being handed a jersey in some games to then catch the eye of the manager. Come the end of the league we were a long way from knowing what Tipperary’s best fifteen were, and also few players were playing at a consistently high level.

Colm Bonnar is a nice man, maybe too nice for this job, and players will sense that, take liberties, and maybe not give the same level of effort in training if a manager is not constantly on their back.

Those of us who interviewed him after the loss to Cork couldn’t have felt sorrier for him as the defeats had taken their toll. He was a broken man, a man who for almost twenty years soldiered for Tipp from minor, under 20, senior, and back to intermediate level. If Bonnar was needed as a player, he never said no, and he didn’t do it as a manager either.

Whenever Tipperary’s 2022 campaign is officially over, a period of reflection is needed. In some ways it should have already started. Firstly, there should have been a plan in place this week for how to deal with a possible relegation game with Kerry. Sunday was the wrong time to bring it up, but it was also the right time as Tipp are where they are, and players have to deal with the consequences and the situation they are in.

Colm Bonnar is an honourable man and has a lot to weigh up in the coming weeks. If he were to stay on, an overhaul of his backroom team is needed, even after just one year. The team needs a young, hungry, and enthusiastic coach, in tune with the modern game, which clearly Tipperary are struggling to adapt to. However, how many of those coaches will come on board in such a difficult situation.

Then, there is the issue that if he stays on, will he still get the buy-in from players next year, including those that opted out this year. He doesn’t have to look far for advice in the guise of Paraic Fanning, whom Bonnar was working with in Dicksboro when he answered the call last year. Fanning took over as Waterford manager in 2019 after the relatively successful term of Derek McGrath who brought them within a puck of a ball of an All-Ireland title in 2017. However, it was an appointment that didn’t work out, suffering four heavy defeats in Munster and come the end of the campaign, it was clear the spirit in the team was gone and when that goes it is hard to get back. The question for Bonnar is, if I stay on, can I get those players, the majority of whom will make up the 2023 panel, to believe in me again.

Tipperary have a recent history of managers struggling in a first year, Liam Cahill as minor manager in 2014 but hasn’t gone on to be too bad since, while James Woodlock bounced back from a poor minor campaign last year and is better a much better tune from his players this year. However, senior hurling is a different beast, and the demands are much greater, particularly in a county like Tipperary where success is almost demanded annually, and to be fair to Bonnar, he knew that when he took on the job.

The next few years don’t look great, but it is hard to imagine Tipperary falling any lower. Some comparisons have been drawn to 2003, 2007 and 2012 when Tipperary exited the championship in ignominious fashion, but in those years they did get to All-Ireland quarter and semi-finals respectively. This year feels closer to 1986 when Tipperary gave up a big lead to Clare in a Munster semi-final in Ennis, extending the famine to fifteen years. We aren’t in famine territory but it does feel like a massive reboot which took place then is needed now.