The impact of the Sunday Game

KILLINAN END

Hindsight gets a bad reputation. Sometimes it gives a clarity that is lacking in the present moment. A dive into the Cork Examiner’s report on a previous Tipp-Waterford encounter is instructive in considering the contrast between the initial immediate reaction the subsequent fallout. The opening paragraph of the report of Tipp’s 1995 Munster quarter final against Waterford down in Páirc Uí Chaoimh was colourful and unyielding in its admiration for a masterclass. According to the late Michael Ellard “in the most humiliating circumstances, Waterford went ever so meekly under the executioner's axe, yielded with devastating power by Tipperary in yesterday's slaughter at Páirc Uí Chaoimh.”

The average Tipperary supporter left the Leeside venue that day under the assumption that - after the extraordinary injury disruption of 1994 - normal service as we saw it from this team was being resumed. Quite what the ceiling was for the team at that point, relying as it did on much of the 1991 team, was unclear. What was clear was that the team appear to have the potential to go deep into the championship.

P.J. Ryan, Chairman of the Waterford County Board, did not disagree in his post-match comment. In attempting to explain the outcome in the context of Waterford’s narrow two-point defeat to Limerick in the previous year's Munster semi-final, he suggested that he had not seen a display like that from Tipperary in the previous 25 years. Hyperbolic perhaps but sometimes the Munster championship does that to people as they claw for superlatives. So far so good for Tipp.

However, towards the end of the report sat a seemingly innocuous reference to an incident where “tempers became frayed and following a brief flare-up Tipp defenders Sheehy and Paul Delaney were booked”. This was a good old-fashioned dust-up behind the Blackrock goal, fiery but brief, served only to liven up a match which was petering out towards an inevitable one-sided conclusion. The defenders mentioned were never likely to be found in the shrinking violet department, and Upperchurch’s Michael Ryan was not found wanting either when duty called. Neither was the referee, Terence Murray, a man to over-react to a bit of alpha-male chest-beating – he booked a few players and everyone got on with their lives. Or so it seemed.

Presumably Michael Ellard’s copy was in the Examiner’s mixer by the time the Sunday Game came on that night. Former Antrim hurler, Ciarán Barr, was conspicuous in highlighting the nature of the incident. Suddenly a shemozzle which has exercised few people at the game for very long began to develop legs. Barr may have been motivated by his experience a year earlier when a Dublin team of which he was a member met Wexford in Nowlan Park, on the same day that Limerick knocked Cork out of the championship for the first time since Olly O’Connor’s match-winner in the 1980 Munster Final.

In the lower-profile game on Noreside, Dublin and Wexford sledged each other with rare abandon from the start and finished 13-aside with a host of players booked. It was a sore day in many respects for Dublin who coughed up an eleven-point lead early in the second half and had to make a draw of it in the end. Wexford’s Tom Dempsey and George O’Connor got the line along with Eamon Clancy and Shay Boland of Dublin.

The tin hat was put on this particular business – certainly from a Dublin perspective – when before the replay their corner-back Tommy McKeown was suspended for twelve months on the word of what was described as a “neutral observer”. It was one of those strange disciplinary decisions the GAA has taken over the years and had echoes a few years later in the Colin Lynch affair when a random observer was also cited. It is difficult to imagine that Ciarán Barr on the Sunday Game would have been as strong on this matter without the Nowlan Park precedent. It is equally difficult to imagine that the GAA would have been as strong on the same issue without prompting on national television.

The rank unfairness of Peter Queally’s Garda graduation being deferred because of his part in the high jinks in Cork displayed official Ireland at its most obnoxious but it did reflect the broader exaggerated reaction. When Tipp took to the field on Leeside in June to face Limerick the following month Paul Delaney and Michael Ryan were sitting in the stand as observers, suspended observers that is. A year earlier, Tipp had faced Clare with a third of the probable starting team out injured. Whatever the parallel outcomes that might be imagined had these two key defenders been available against Limerick in 1995 the narrowness of the one-point defeat and the background of injury the previous year did little to dispel the notion that somehow, we had offended the Gods of karma. Let us hope that our latest joust with the Déise goes off without any fallout.