Tipp's Hunger Game remains difficult to address

By Shane Brophy

Semple Stadium maybe Tipperary’s hurling coliseum but it is the visiting hoards that tend to feast on the natives rather than the other way around.

What was set up as a knockout clash between the last two All-Ireland champions for progression to the next stage on Saturday evening turned into a one-sided mismatch as Tipperary tamely gave up their hold of the Liam MacCarthy Cup.

In many ways it was foreseen based the seasonas a whole but the hope was the three week break from the Waterford game would have given Tipp time to freshen and sharpen up to hit their straps, instead, bar the first fifteen minutes, they performed like there was weights tied to their boots.

Some will say it is fitness related, although Tipp manager Liam Cahill pointed afterwards that the players were hitting all their targets in training compared to last year.

That leaves the mental side and it would appear the hunger fuelled by the humiliation of 2024 which was so vital in driving the All-Ireland success of last year has gone. No one would have been more aware than the management that the mental side would have been the difficult part this year. New goals had to be set but it is only when you have to fight for the dirty ball in championship do you really know the top-end desire there, and this year it hasn’t.

Early championship elimination would have been a little easier to accept if the team had gone out on their shields, instead their fate against Clare on Saturday was determined long before the final whistle, confirmed the following day by Limerick’s late rally to defeat Waterford.

What we got from Clare is what Tipperary supporters would have been looking for, a team reacting positively to a poor performance last time out, ravenous in everything they did, whereas only Robert Doyle, Ronan Maher, Bryan O’Mara, Jake Morris and Jason Forde could say they were at least on par in their personal battles.

Every time a Tipp player got the ball, they were immediately harassed and hassled in possession in comparison to Clare players for the majority had a yard or two of space coming onto the ball, and with players of their quality, they will feast on quality ball like that.

And it wasn’t their key players that were to the fore, it was their young blood in Niall O’Farrell, Diarmuid Stritch, and Sean Rynne who did much of the damage but crucially the recalls of David McInerney and John Conlon had a particularly calming impact on their defence while moving Cathal Malone to wing forward gave them a physical presence.

And then Ian Galvin comes on and he loves nothing more than scoring goals against Tipp in Thurles. The fact that he had as many shots (1-2 plus 4 wides) as Tipp had wides (5) says a lot about the difference between the teams on the evening.

The Tipp half-forward axis of Jake Morris, Andrew Ormond, and Sam O’Farrell last year was crucial in terms of winning regular possession off Rhys Shelly’s puckouts, and with working the ball out from the back not as effective as it was either compared to last year, when Shelly was forced to go long, the old Tipp weakness of winning primary possession in attack reared its ugly head again.

Before the start of the championship, Cork’s Donal Og Cusack raised the ire of some within the county when he said that nobody rises and falls as quickly as Tipperary. He wasn’t wrong then and this campaign only re-enforced it.

It’s not the pressure of trying to go back-to-back for the first time since 1964-65, that’s a lazy talking point for people outside the county to throw at Tipp as there hasn’t been a mention of the back-to-back inside the county boundary.

It’s the inconsistency from one season to the next that is frustrating. In the seven iterations of the round-robin format going back to 2018, Tipp haven’t qualified in the top 3 in consecutive seasons, and yet in two of the three campaigns they have progressed out of Munster, they have gone on to win the All-Ireland.

It’s a strange phenomenon, even going down to minor level where every second year in James Woodlock’s six years in charge, they have won a Munster title having struggled the year before.

For all the terrific development work going on at underage level, the mental side is surely an area that can be targeted for gains in terms of getting players better prepared to deal with the “disease of success” as former Clare manager Ger Loughnane termed it. It is what makes Brian Cody, John Kiely and Jim Gavin the great managers they were to sustain the hunger within their Kilkenny, Limerick and Dublin sides for so long.

It’s something the Tipperary management and players will have to look into in what will be a long off-season, but in terms of this year, there were certain factors that didn’t help.

The impact made by the youngsters Darragh McCarthy, Sam O’Farrell, Robert Doyle and Oisin O’Donoghue in 2025 invigorated the experienced players which generated the perfect storm. There wasn’t the same infusion this year, as apart from Stefan Tobin, no one else threatened to break up the status quo at either end of the field.

It also needed players on the panel a couple of years such as Joe Caesar, Gearoid O’Connor, Peter McGarry, Josh Keller, and Sean Kenneally (injury accepting for the latter two) to push the starters but it didn’t happen. Only Alan Tynan and Oisin O’Donoghue went from subs to starters this year but that isn’t enough.

Competition for places is the best antidote to stave off complacency and when you look at the team that started on Saturday evening, it was thirteen of the fifteen that started in the All-Ireland final ten months ago and nineteen of the twenty that featured at Croke Park with Stefan Tobin being the only new face.

As All-Ireland title defences go, it hasn’t been a good one but the first step to the next one can be taken in Limerick next Sunday.