What you see is what you get from Liam Cahill

By Shane Brophy

“Even though you’re the manager of a team, you’re looking in as a supporter too to make sure they reflect everything that you want in an outfit to make people proud.” - The words of Liam Cahill in describing his vision of what it is to manage the Tipperary senior hurling team.

Indeed, it has been what Cahill has applied to all his teams going back to late 2013 when he was handed the reins of a county team for the first time, the Tipperary minors. It didn’t start easy, heavy defeats to Limerick and Clare in the 2014 campaign saw it a short one, but as the Ballingarry clubman has shown ever since, he learns from the tough times.

“Are you taking on a role to be personally successful or taking on the role to genuinely improve the team regardless of the results,” he pointed.

“Are you taking it on as a hurling person, or GAA person who loves hurling?

“Yes, it’s performance-driven and performance-related. But when people look back on managerial terms, they judge it by what you’ve won.”

2015 saw redemption in the form of a Munster minor title before coming up short to Galway in the All-Ireland final. That was also the year the minor footballers reached the All-Ireland decider with eleven dual players between both sides. As impressive as it was to make in two All-Ireland finals, albeit it without success, Cahill wasn’t afraid to make the tough calls and for the 2016 campaign he controversially demanded full commitment to the minor hurlers, so no dual players.

He also wasn’t afraid to butt heads with parents, when in that 2016 campaign following a first round loss to Waterford, Tipp won a do or die playoff against Clare in Ennis, following which Cahill made the comment “their own geese are swans” as regards their view of their son and whether they should be in the team.

What followed was a dominant run to the Munster and All-Ireland titles, indeed the first of three All-Ireland titles in four years for Cahill with under 21 & 20 successes following in 2018 and 2019, and will complete the set this Sunday with a senior victory.

This All-Ireland Senior final isn’t Liam’s first taste of the biggest game in the hurling year, that came with Waterford back in 2020, in surreal circumstances of the Covid All-Ireland played at an empty Croke Park in December of that year.

“The Covid All-Ireland, as strange as it was, has definitely helped in my development,” he said.

“The way we tweak our preparations leading into the game, etc... You try to look back and get good learnings from that, to make sure you’re in the right place for Sunday week,” he said in terms of the two-week turnaround.

Coming Home

When the Tipperary job became available for the 2022 campaign, Cahill was the name on everyone’s lips, but he turned it down, opting to remain with the Deise. It was a huge risk personally as he didn’t know when the opportunity would come around again, but when it did less than twelve months later, he didn’t need to think twice, stepping down from Waterford on a Thursday and installed as Tipp manager the following Monday.

“The key objective when I became Tipperary manager was to bring change but to keep it as competitive as well,” he explained.

“We did that in 2023 as best we could with the players we had at our disposal.

“2024, as disappointing as it was, it wasn’t a massive surprise to me in hindsight. We felt it was always going to be a tough year, because there were a lot of players bottoming out from a long career, a lot of areas where our bringing through of players, who we knew were in the background, were not up to the readiness yet.

“Our preparations tweaked a little bit around trying to keep injury prevention down, and get our fitness balance right, and that kind of hurt us a little bit because maybe we didn’t see out games as good as we should have in 2024.

“There have been a lot of different aspects to go after from 2023-24 and leading into 2025. It has been huge for management, coaches, and players to pick those areas, obviously fitness being number one, our mindset, our unity within the group to make sure it was a lot tighter than maybe it was, and obviously the integration of younger players as well. All of those areas were huge in getting us to where we are today.”

Liam Cahill is a person who always wears his heart on his sleeve and what you see is what you get. There is no sugar-coating with him, he doesn’t hide behind cliches, particularly that criticism doesn’t hurt, it does, particularly the ill-informed statements from pundits and supporters over his managerial approach.

“The ones around that Cahill flogs his teams, his excruciating training sessions,” he said of the one that annoys him the most.

“Liam Cahill doesn’t make it up as he goes along. People commenting on stuff like that not knowing what exactly is going on behind the scenes is lazy and ill-informed. Maybe not annoyed over it, but a little bit aggrieved that something so loose like that creates so much traction.

“There were other things such as, Cahill plays with a sweeper; Liam Cahill never played with a sweeper on his team in his life, ever. If it materialises it is because of the opposition forcing it.

“When you hear people talking about that, and Cahill’s team not coached right, I got really annoyed over that, with the effort that goes in behind the scenes with Mikey Bevans, our head coach, and the work he does with the players on the field, and loose comments come out that it looks like these players were never coached.

“It’s hard not to but it does give you the motivation to go ahead and try and prove people wrong.

“As I said, you can’t get too sensitive over these things. You have to understand that these questions have to be asked too when the performances aren’t there.”

He added: “Referencing Shane’s (Brophy) question after the Clare game (2024), it probably was warranted at the time but it’s a tougher question when it comes from one of your own.

“The reality of it is, the County Board had given me a three-year term to try and fix this thing the best I could.

“Yes, there was not much of a ship sticking out of the water, and it didn’t look like it was going to come back up any time soon. But, I had huge belief in my ability to turn it around. I had huge belief in my coaching system, Mikey Bevans, I have huge belief in him, and Declan Laffan and his experience with what he had done on the club scene in Tipperary and Laois. So, I knew I had the right people around me, so it was a case of getting it fixed.”

Righting the Ship

Such was the demoralising nature of how last years campaign concluded, getting the players together to believe 2025 could be difficult was going to be the toughest part and Cahill admitted it took time.

“Coming off the campaign we had, there will obviously be mental scars,” he said.

“The key was to break it down bit by bit, break down our little goals and little targets, and start building up the momentum gradually.

“Ye guys, not all of ye, put the narrative out that Tipp would thunder into it for the league and then they’ll fall asunder.

“We had to go after the league for little gains to build up that confidence. When you start doing that and the players see it coming through suddenly you are going away to difficult assignments in the league in Pearse Stadium and Nowlan Park and getting results.

“The you find yourself in a league final, and you say, right, let’s bank that as one of our goals achieved and start ramping up for the first round of the championship.

“The Limerick game in Thurles was huge for us to really start building that mental mindset again. To come through that game with something out of it, a draw, and it’s always difficult for me anyway to get one over on John Kiely but we took a lot of confidence out of that match, it was the manner in which we grinded out that result that gave us the platform to put aside what people may think and say about us that Tipp can win in the winter and can’t come summer, all those little things help to fuel the desire to get the job done.”

The positivity from the Limerick result was quickly dimmed by the second big defeat to Cork in the space of three weeks. Albeit, largely impacted by the first-minute sending off of Darragh McCarthy, Cahill took a lot from that day, not just the spirit shown, but the weaknesses that manifested themselves similarly as they did in the league final.

“First and foremost, out of the Cork game, to come out of that with fourteen players, the way we performed from a spirit perspective, no one downed tools, we weren’t expecting them to anyway, but to keep trying to do the right thing, being under the cosh for the full game really.

“We came out of that with a huge boost in confidence, when we look back on it properly and together, the chances we created, what we could have gotten out of the game had we been a little bit better from an execution point of view, and our score conversion, gave us great energy to go to Ennis to get a result.”

He added: “We knew going to Ennis we were going to have to bring energy again, and bodies were really tired after that Cork match, and we freshened it up with players such as Andy Ormond and a few others in terms of energy around the field. They were performing really well in training and were probably looking at me saying, when am I going to get my opportunity, and when they got it, they took it.

The win over Clare was the cross-roads game for the team this year. It was win or bust at the home of the All-Ireland champions, where after coughing up a twelve point lead and with the Banner having all the momentum, Tipp produced a gritty closing fifteen minutes to earn the win, a trait that manifested itself again in the closing stages of the All-Ireland semi-final.

“We’ve come through some really tough games, with big performances and big moments in matches,” Cahill continued.

“All through the Munster championship, the Clare game in Ennis, Waterford coming back level with us with ten minutes to go in Thurles, and the All-Ireland semi-final against Kilkenny.

“So, this is not a flash in the pan from this group of players, they’re doing it consistently throughout the 2025 season, so we’ll huge gain huge encouragement from that. It will be something important for us if we can bring this thing down to the last five or ten minutes of the All-Ireland and we’re still in the hunt, I think we will have huge resilience and belief in our ability to get the job done.”

Liam Cahill Managerial record

Tipperary

Minor: Played - 16, Won – 10; Drew – 1, Lost – 5

Under 20/21: Played - 8: Won – 7; Lost – 1.

Senior: Played 17 – Won – 7; Drew – 3; Lost – 7

Waterford

Senior: Played – 14; Won – 7; Lost – 7

Total: Played – 55; Won – 31; Drew – 4; Lost 20 (Win Percentage – 56%)