WHY TIPP ARE ALSO WINNERS FOR ME
THE beauty when you lose the right way is that you can end up winning too.
I had my ear reddened this week by an eager Limerick hurling enthusiast who took such encouragement from Tipperary’s defeat to Kilkenny last Sunday that he took to dancing on their graves.
‘I will tell you one thing, Tom, I would not be one bit afraid of them after that,’ suggested my good friend.
‘And I will tell you one thing back,’ I replied, ‘I would be a lot more afraid of them now than I would had they actually won.’
I am not going to blow my own trumpet here by reminding you I wrote here last weekend that Kilkenny would defy their outsiders’ status to win the Allianz League.
It was a significant result, one you could see that mattered such was the joy etched on the faces of the players and their manager Brian Cody, and with reason.
They are back, but then they had never gone away.
It was a result which ensured that a new generation got to taste what it is like to be part of a successful Kilkenny team.
There are enough wise Cats still around to remind these young kittens that they better become addicted to that taste or they won’t last long in Cody’s litter.
So, yes, Kilkenny are in a very good place, but just because last Sunday was a big win for Cody’s men does not necessarily correlate into it being a huge defeat for Michael Ryan’s Tipperary team.
The prediction I will take even more pride in getting right, and I am confident I will, is that the big losers in this year’s League were Waterford, Cork and Galway — the three teams who decided that they were too good and clever to reveal their hand in the spring.
Mark my word, there will be a price to be paid for that, just as Tipp will cash in for embracing the League in the right manner.
They lost nothing more than a match, but the fact that it was a national final to Kilkenny will hurt and that’s no bad thing.
But this was nothing like 12 months ago, when they never truly recovered from that mauling by Galway.
They were a dead team walking after that but it says something about their quality they stumbled their way to come within a point of the eventual champions in the All-Ireland semi-final.
They are in a far better place now. For starters, they weren’t target practice in a fun-fair game last Sunday; they played their full part in a vibrant game of hurling.
True, they lost and they deserved to lose but they head into the summer with a better squad; the likes of Aidan Flynn, Barry Heffernan and Billy McCarthy adding to Ryan’s selection headache come Championship.
The big difference with last year was that it was impossible to take any education from their implosion, which added to the concern that would accompany them for the rest of the season as they were stripped of their provincial and All-Ireland crowns.
That does not apply this time. That is not to say that weaknesses were not exposed, but they are ones that can be addressed. The most obvious is the long-running issue at full-back.
I suggested on this page last week that Walter Walsh would simply be too strong for James Barry and so it proved. While TJ Reid rightly was Kilkenny’s manof-the-match, it was Walsh who sign-posted the way for other teams who lack a player of Reid’s class to get at the Tipp defence.
The thing is, even though he won an All-Ireland there, Barry is not a full-back in the traditional sense. He lacks the physical presence and the ruthless man-marking instincts which used to be a key part of the weaponry of a fullback, before we were told by all those clever clogs that the position has evolved.
Really? Well someone would want to tell those rocket scientists the traditional full-forward is very much back in vogue.
If you don’t believe me check out, apart from Walsh, the likes of Seamus Callanan (Tipperary), Shane Dowling (Limerick), Seamus Harnedy (Cork) and Galway’s Joe Canning, and then tell me that a specialist full-back is now redundant.
Tipperary have to find one and it may mean going back to the future by returning Padraic Maher to the edge of the square.
It is hard to see another way, but while that is a problem for Tipperary, it is not half the problem it would have turned out to be had Walsh not exposed it in the first instance.
The other area of concern is a more general but no less disturbing one; Tipp were physically bullied at times in the second-half and in the end they just could not cope with Kilkenny’s intensity.
That has always been the foundation stone which Kilkenny’s modern-day dominance of Tipperary was built on, but had been addressed in recent times.
Being reminded that when you play Kilkenny you have to put you shoulder on the line to bring your wrist into play is no bad lesson — one they will have to heed if they meet again later in the year, which I believe they will.
This Kilkenny team is for real and right now I would put them ahead of Galway as the team to beat in Leinster.
As for all that talk about Munster being a wide open race Tipp are still a full stride ahead of the rest and that lead could stretch if they heed the lessons of Sunday.
They have everything to play for and with Kilkenny back on their radar, they will relish the months ahead.
So should we.
They can address their weaknesses