Woodlock reflects on tough yearBy Therese O’Callaghan

There has been a remarkable symmetry to James Woodlock’s five years in charge of the Tipperary minors so far, disappointing campaigns in 2021, 2023 and 2025, but in the intervening years there have been two Munster and All-Ireland titles.

“We’ve experienced it all in the last couple of years as a management team,” he admitted as this years campaign ended with defeat to Cork on Friday

“We won two fantastic All-Irelands, two Munster finals and then you have a year like this when you have a bundle of players who did everything but couldn’t find a way to get over the line at the end of the day. We were out of the championship by five points.

He added :“This Munster championship is a fantastic championship. I love playing it and I love managing it.

“But you have to make no mistake. That’s hard, yes, but it is my job to give them that experience.

“It is probably the hardest age group to manage at by a long way because you deal with a new group of players every year coming into a short space of time and you have to turn them into young men.

“You have to get them ready for the real world and I’d like to think this management team over the last couple of years have made young fellas into men and given them a real learning experience in relation to sport but also life values. It has been a learning environment for them.

“This group of players just came up short in a couple of games, a puck of a ball in three games and we are out of the championship.

“You’d love to say if you had it back again it could have gone the other way but unfortunately, we are out of the championship.

“They are the green shoots coming through. If I reflect on 2022 when the minors won the All-Ireland, five of them are already on the senior set up with two of them starting, playing in a league final this year, and now hurling in the Munster championship.

“That’s how close it is for this bundle of players. Some of these players in this group are going to hurl for Tipp seniors and Tipp 20s - I have no doubt about that.

“But they will have to learn from this campaign, when you are the five or six points up that we were in most games, you have to see the job out. That is a huge learning for this group of players."