KILLINAN END - Tipp and Offaly - the infrequent of rivals

Tipperary and Offaly in the Minor final – it doesn’t get much fresher and shinier than that.

It is always a curiosity of the hurling championship over the years that some counties with long-established traditions have met so rarely. Even those sharing borders have often keep kept apart by the provincial system. Sometimes you get surges like with Tipp and Kilkenny – six All-Ireland finals in eleven years – after 2009. When they met in 1991 it had been twenty years. The next one could be a fair while off too. Cork-Kilkenny met in three All-Ireland finals in four years 2003-06 and now sixteen years have elapsed since that last meeting.

Tipperary-Offaly was perhaps always a different matter. Offaly’s winning tradition has been sporadic though perhaps all the more memorable for that. It is also a matter of chance that even when Offaly were on a high between 1981 and 1998 – six Senior final appearances - they still managed to avoid Tipp who got to four finals during those years. The one where there was a real chance was in 1989 when only an unexpected defeat against Antrim for Offaly prevented a Cold War around Roscrea.

What is less well-remembered but no less true is that 1988 was also a possible Tipp-Offaly All-Ireland final which slipped away as Galway beat Offaly on a day when Tipp beat Antrim in the semi-finals. These were days when Offaly were trying great defenders such as Pat Delaney and Eugene Coughlan up font which is often a sign of a team running on empty.

They counties did have a get-together in the 1988 League Final which was quite a novelty at the time – Tipp’s first League final in nine years, Offaly’s first in seven – and it remains the counties’ only meeting in a League final. Hard to imagine nowadays but the semi-finals that year - Tipp/Waterford and Wexford/Offaly - were played as double-header in Croke Park. It is nearly impossible at this remove to express the freshness of it all for a Tipp hurling community which had endured much. Tipp approached the final in expectation and won a game of swaying fortunes. Tipp had Ken Hogan to thank for a few saves in the early stages against his neighbours. Tipp’s nine-point second-half lead shrank to four before the dial stopped eventually at nine, 3-15 to 2-9, with Offaly showing typical disdain for the trend of the match and launching one of the standard comebacks.

Just eight months earlier the counties had also broken ground when they met in their first Minor hurling final. It was not a year where Tipp enjoyed much luck with a couple of players falling to broken legs during the campaign. An ultimately unsuccessful final threw up a couple of gems in Conal Bonner and John Leahy who were on the Senior team which won just two years later. Leahy played in the 1988 final v Galway while still 18 years old. Liam Sheedy was a slower burner, but he certainly burned bright.

The Faithful county was not short of its jewels either including John Troy, Billy Dooley, Michael Duignan, and the mighty Brian Whelahan. Offaly’s two-point win was the county’s second successive Minor title and maybe the ultimate confirmation of its new-found status.

Offaly’s first Senior breakthrough had come in 1980 when they won the Leinster hurling final before winning the All-Ireland a year later. Offaly had, of course, threatened previously and perhaps most notably back in 1969 when they knocked out Wexford, the All-Ireland champions, only to come up short by two points against Kilkenny in the final. The Senior success was foreshadowed more recently by an unlikely win in the 1978 Leinster Under-21 championship. That competition had a decidedly late ‘80s Senior championship look about it as Offaly lost to Galway in the semi-final while Tipp beat Antrim in the other. It nods too to the current Offaly minors in that it was Laois who were beaten in the Leinster decider. It also qualifies 1978 as the first year of Offaly’s recent ascendancy where the ships had passed so closely in the night. There had been a meeting in the 1953 All-Ireland Junior ‘home’ final when a Tipp team featuring the great Theo English won an All-Ireland.

Perhaps the most electric day of all when the counties crossed paths was on a throbbing day in Portlaoise in 1989 when they had a chance to re-run that Minor final of a couple of years earlier. Fortunes never swayed like they did on this day. A few early goals had Tipp seven points down. Then Clonoulty’s Dan Quirke chose this day of days to pull a hat-trick out of the bag to leave Tipp seven up at the break. Offaly gave a powerful second-half performance with wind assistance but still came up short by two points. There can’t have been have many finals over the years which had the quality of the teams on display on that day. Declan Ryan, John Leahy, Brian Whelahan, Daithí Regan, and Johnny Dooley were just some of the names that would sparkle in the future. Added lustre came to Tipp’s success with the altitude much of that Offaly team achieved in the mid-90s at Senior level.

It’s been a brief enough chapter between these counties, but it has produced stars to beat the band. No doubt some day we will look back on Sunday’s game and point out the talents that emerged too.