KILLINAN END - Life beyond defeat
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” - The words, remarkably famous words indeed, are those of Charles Dickens as the introductory paragraph of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.
Such was the fate of Tipp’s hurlers half a century ago that Gerry Slevin, once of this parish, adopted this style in his reminiscence on the year in the Tipperary GAA yearbook which looked back on 1974. What brings it to mind is that the Munster championship of that year culminated in a Limerick-Clare match in the final in Thurles, the same pairing that will light the touchpaper for this year’s event. And as coincidence would have it a Cork-Waterford game was the opening game and a defining contest in that same championship. As 1974 opened Limerick were, as today, defending All-Ireland champions, However, a severe beating in the National League Final against Cork had softened their cough considerably in the springtime.
The concession of six goals by the All-Ireland champions against the Rebels in the League Final certainly pointed to Cork as a huge threat to the ambitions of any team anywhere. If Cork controlled the latter half the 1970s in winning three-in-a-row between 1976 and 1978, they might look on the first half of the decade as one of false dawns after their 1970 All-Ireland success. Their trip to Walsh Park for the first round of the 1974 Munster championship was a classic example. Not since 1967 had Waterford vaulted the first hurdle in Munster. This is where it gets decidedly eerie. Back in that Summer of Love, Cork’s hurlers left the county as All-Ireland champions for the first time in a dozen years for a repeat of the previous year’s Munster Final against Waterford. In Walsh Park.
The Rebel County left with their title in tatters. The realisation had dawned that return to former glories would be a slippery slope indeed. Seven years later in ’74, the same venue and opposition visited calamity upon the recently crowned League Champions. Paddy Barry, Cork’s goalkeeper – in what would be his last championship match – got the line after an altercation with an umpire. Cork’s solution was to substitute the goalkeeper’s outfield namesake, Paddy Barry, with sub goalkeeper Martin Coleman. The fourteen men came up short in seismic shock. The paved the way for the semi-finals: Waterford v Limerick and Tipperary v Clare.
By the time Tipp and Clare met, Waterford had exited the championship at the hands of Limerick by the narrowest margin. In prospect was a repeat of the 1973 decider between Tipp and Limerick who were the sport’s greatest rivals in those years – they had drawn some 15,000 spectators to a National League game the previous February. The alternative was a first Limerick-Clare final since their unexpected meeting in the 1955 final. As Gerry Slevin observed, Tipp had little reason to be complacent given the way Clare had performed in the later stages of the League.
At this point some of the deeper signs in Tipp hurling were less than optimistic. The win in the previous year’s Munster Minor Final was the first in eleven years and at some point this dearth of success and its underlying reasons would surely start to tell at Senior level. Maybe 1974 was the start of this process. On the same day that West Germany beat Netherlands in soccer’s World Cup Final in Munich, a one-point win for Clare mirrored the 1955 margin in Tipp’s previous loss to the Banner. It was a margin the county would endure a few more times in the coming decade. Tipp’s starting team that day 50 years ago was: Séamus Shinnors; Liam King, Liam Hackett, John Kelly; Tadhg O’Connor, Mick Roche, Noel O’Dwyer; PJ Ryan, Séamus Hogan; Francis Loughnane, John Flanagan, Paul Byrne; Jim Kehoe, Roger Ryan, Michael Keating. Timmy Delaney, Joe Tynan and Dinny Ryan also played.
Gerry Slevin actually wrote “there are good years and there are bad years; there are years when everything, or nearly everything seems to go right and we can sit back and relax, and there are other years when we seem to get stuck in the mud and nothing goes right.” The county’s fortunes were indeed mud-bound for a considerable period. Clare’s dawn was a false one too. They shipped six goals against Limerick just as they had done in a previous mauling in the 1972 Munster Final against Cork.
All these pairings will be repeated in the coming weeks. Half a century on is there a chance Waterford could upset Cork? Ennis has seen Clare do well against Limerick with memorable wins against expectations in 1972 and 1992. This is a game of a different hue even allowing for Limerick’s formidable status these days. Clare will go in with substance to their expectation. They might do well to remember last year when they lost to Tipp at this venue in the first round. The game is necessarily big and important given the rivalry between the teams in recent years. But there is life beyond defeat too. There must be.