Tipp head into championship under a cloud of uncertainty

The curious thing about the National League has always been that only the eventual winner doesn’t get to enter the championship under some sort of a cloud.

By Shane Brophy

For the fifteenth year in a row going back to their last league success in 2008, Tipperary go into the championship off the back of some kind of disappointment. Only the epic 2009 final loss to Kilkenny at Semple Stadium felt like a momentum-builder which they carried on into the championship.

Sunday’s semi-final loss to Clare felt similar to many other league exits, not quite the worst which was the 2017 final hammering to Galway which was a humbling experience, but this felt a lot like many of the losses to Kilkenny where we never really brought the required fight and focus.

Not for one second did Tipperary go out not to win this game on Sunday, but they didn’t look like they were fully prepared either, compared to a Clare side that turned up with the required focus and appetite to reach a league final.

Many suggested in advance that Tipperary’s need to get to a final was greater considering they don’t play in the first round in Munster but from the moment the ball was thrown in at O’Moore Park,they didn’t look like a side primed to win.

There were worrying similarities to the championship defeats to Waterford and Galway last summer where Tipperary didn’t bring the required level of urgency and intensity from the start. Management will take their share of the blame for again not having the players in the right mental space, but the players cannot be absolved and have to ask themselves why they weren’t at the pitch of the game from the off.

As impressive as Clare’s eight point salvo in the opening twelve minutes was, it was made all the easier with the stand-off nature of Tipp’s challenge. It was too easy for Clare players to work the ball into space and get shots away. The most glaring of all was in the fourteenth minute where corner back Adam Hogan collected a short puckout and took off on a sixty-yard solo-run with Patrick Maher giving chase, but not Tipp challenge coming to meet him before firing over from long range.

Not only that, even accounting for the strong breeze into their faces, Tipp struggled to create their own chances, Jason Forde’s twelfth minute free being their first score. By that time, Forde had missed the first of his five frees in the game and nine wides in total of Tipp’s final tally of nineteen. The Silvermines clubman is as accurate as they come, and his struggles were as unexplainable as elements of the overall performance.

Not only that, Tipp had an able back-up in Gearoid O’Connor but even he missed with his two efforts when moved onto the frees before half time. The yips returned for Forde in the second half which led to Willie Connors and Sean Ryan both getting opportunities to take dead-balls, each missing nine each. It was as bizarre as it was embarrassing towards the end.

Tipp’s free-taking ails highlighted a mess of a performance, and yet still ten minutes into the second half, they trailed by just two points after a blistering start to the second period. Conor Bowe set the tone by winning the throw-in and immediately ran hard at the Clare defence before playing in sub Sean Hayes for a goal within fourteen seconds.

With fellow subs Alan Tynan and Sean Kenneally also making an immediate impact on the scoreboard, it looked like Tipperary had finally come to play. However, the surge was brief as once the game settled again, it appeared that ten period was pride saving and not ultimately sustainable as for the rest of the game they were outscored 0-8 to 0-2.

There were a lot of elements from the performance to be concerned about, including that closing period where following Kenneally’s point on 45 minutes, Tipp would only score twice more, a Jake Morris point from play on 54 minutes with a Sean Ryan free being their last on 68.

The forwards completely lost their shape where on two separate occasions, Jason Forde and Sean Ryan, both won the ball around the middle third, then looked inside to where they saw no options but still hit the ball in anyway. This as much as anything summed up the nothingness of the Tipperary performance.

The tin-hat was put on it by Jake Morris’ late red card (two yellows), a pull down on the hand of Rory Hayes out of sheer frustration, despite him being one of Tipp’s better performers (along with Craig Morgan and Willie Connors), with his goal in the sixteenth minute a glimpse of what Tipperary do at their best, a drilled pass from Bryan O’Mara to Dan McCormack whose fifty yard pass to Morris was right on the money, from where the Nenagh man side-stepped Adam Hogan to fire to the net.

That goal, despite all Tipp’s struggles up to that point, left the score at 0-9 to 1-3, but they never got a chance to build on that momentum as they gave the three-pointer straight back from the puckout where, again, symptomatic of the malaise on the day, Michael Breen waited for the ball to drop whereas David Fitzgerald attacked it, knocking it down to himself where he found way too much room down the middle to run into and availed of it with a well-finished goal.

How they were so open down the middle highlights that an issue remains at centre-back. We still don’t know who the number one goalkeeper is? Why after so many games at wing back was Conor Bowe moved to midfield?

Maybe all this is by design from the management who were using the league as a means to an end to give players as much game-time as possible, and that the next five weeks in Dr. Morris Park is where the questions will be answered as few players can confidently say they will be starting against Limerick on April 28th. That should lead to plenty of competition in training and maybe that is what Liam Cahill has been planning all along.

So many things were highlighted in this game that have to be addressed for championship, and it is a good thing that they have been now, but it is happening too often where Tipp produce one of these sub-par performances and that lack of consistency won’t win any team silverware.

They have five-weeks to iron things out before they enter the championship against Limerick. There has been plenty of evidence in the past of Tipperary coming out a different team come championship, and that is what supporters will be hanging their hats on because this was a tame way to finish the league as a chance of confidence boosting silverware came and went once more.