Hard to make sense of the whole thing - Cahill
By Shane Brophy
Long after the final whistle, Tipperary manager Liam Cahill remained perplexed as to why his players didn’t come near hitting the heights of what was required against Clare.
“There is huge disappointment in that dressing room. It's just so difficult to try and make sense of the whole thing,” he began.
“The only sense we can make of it is that Clare came fully ready to go to war and fair play to them. Hats off to them. They put their bodies on the line and they deserved the win.
“We have to go away and have a really good look at ourselves individually and collectively to see what we can do to try and make some sense of it and fix things as best we can heading to Limerick.”
He added: “The players put in a huge effort. We prepared really well. All of our players put their hand up and to say that all our metrics, all our numbers are exactly where they need to be versus where they were this time last year.
“But it's about bringing it to the big arena on the day and being prepared to put your body on the line. Today, physically, Clare really dominated as a swarm tackle. Clare were there in numbers. How many times did you see our guys trying to reach out to get a high hand-pass up over a group of players all around them They were hunting in packs and they smelt blood and they went after it. That's just the way it is. We just didn't get to the pitch that's required to get success at this level.”
Going in at half time six points adrift but with the elements to come, Tipp were still in with a shout but the concession of the goal seconds into the second half was a real body-blow.
“Even up to half-time, not hurling really well, six points down, you'd say, look, with the elements of the wind maybe behind your back in the second half, we said, look, we're not in a bad place here. Suddenly you're caught for a goal right at the start of the second half and it's all downhill after that,” Cahill added.
“Fellas start to curl up. They lose that little bit of bravery on the ball and breaks go either left or right. It's just chasing the game. It's just a really difficult place to be as a player and definitely as a manager and a coach watching and looking in at it.
“You can live with one or two, three players maybe going bad at a particular time or struggling and you'll do your best to manoeuvre and fix it on the line.
“I don't want to make it any worse than it already is but with the exception of maybe Robert Doyle and Bryan O'Mara, where else would you go to say that the rest of the players were up to a level that they'd be happy with themselves?
“You can only bring in five subs and to be fair, I'm not heaping all the blame at the players' feet either, I'm genuinely not, but I know that I can speak freely enough because they know me well enough to say that they know when seven, eight, or nine players go away at the one time, numbers on the scoreboard happen like what happened outside.
“Unfortunately, this particular group have a history of doing this and we know that and we try to address it and we go about it really well on the hurling field, on the training field and hope that we bring it to the match day.
“But when we start hurling in fear, with not being able to hurl that ball out and putting our hand out looking for it and making sure that we're giving options to the men on the ball, when we don't do that, we're a really moderate team. It's just a real Jekyll and Hyde performance versus this time last year.”
Tipperary were forced to work the ball out as the half forward line which was such an effective ball-winning area last year was again snuffed out with Clare cutting off all the avenues for Rhys Shelly to ping his puckouts.
Cahill said: “We were brave at certain times. I know there were marginal occasions where we were very close to being turned over. I love to see our players doing that and taking the chance.
“Because, as you correctly said, if you're labouring across a half-forward line, you're trying to work that ball to the middle of the field to get in deep and take away that line of the field if possible. But that's credit to good defenders too and good fit defenders.
“Forward movement now is all about double and treble runs and trying to create space. That's fairly energy and oxygen sapping. Clare just seemed to be everywhere. Clare went man for man; we knew they would. That's what they do defensively, they go man for man. We felt that we would have the legs in open space to expose that. But our runners weren’t hard enough today. Our desire to create that separation between the back and the forward, and to be able to transition that ball quick enough inside to give our forwards a chance to get on ball just got less and less as the game went on.”