PREMIER GLORY A FADING MEMORY
WHEN Austin Gleeson placed the ball down and stood over a Waterford free in injury-time from all of 100 metres, it wasn’t long before Tipperary supporters in Thurles experienced that familiar sinking feeling. Once again, the senior hurlers had their nose bloodied just before the final bell. Once again, the endgame had gone against them when it could so easily have gone the other way.
Like a fortnight previously in Nowlan Park when Michael Ryan’s team showed fighting spirit and character to lead the All-Ireland champions for most of the first 67 minutes — until Kilkenny did a job on them in the closing moments, Kevin Kelly rattling the net not once, but twice.
Today’s trip to Salthill will evoke memories of last August when an All-Ireland semi-final was settled by an injury-time point from Galway’s Shane Moloney, turning a Championship rookie into a household name overnight.
Losing tight battles has become a bad habit that Tipperary haven’t been able to shake since the All-Ireland breakthrough summer of 2010 when arguably the defining moment of their campaign came in the dying stages of the quarter-final against the same opposition. Two down with time running out, points from John O’Brien and Gearoid Ryan levelled it. Given how he would go on to be named Hurler of the Year, fittingly, it was Lar Corbett who had the last word, coming around on the loop to take a pass from Pa Bourke and fire over the winner.
‘It was as well we won because I don’t think we would ever have recovered from losing,’ said Corbett in his memoir ‘All In My Head’. ‘Maybe the eight lads under the age of 22 would have coped but the likes of myself, Eoin [Kelly] and Brendan [Cummins], I’m not so sure.
‘Also, it was the first time in my memory that Tipp came back from the dead in a Championship match. Cyril Farrell called it a classic, an epic. Ger Loughnane went a step further and called it the “epic of all epics”. ’When Tipperary went on to lift the Liam MacCarthy, Corbett’s glorious hat-trick underpinning the demise of Kilkenny’s five-in-a-row bid, the future looked blue and gold.
Instead, in the five Championship seasons since, Tipperary have only won a single game by a single score margin, the 2012 Munster semi-final against Cork. In the same period, they have lost five by a single score. As a general rule, they either win comfortably or not at all.
The question then has to be asked if the bad habit of losing matches in the final five to 10 minutes is down to a leadership deficit.
Brendan and Padraic Maher have been the beating heart of Tipperary during that same period, producing it under pressure more than anyone. And yet that recent League defeat by Kilkenny was notable for the fact that team captain Brendan’s direct opponent James Maher scored four points from play and was named Man of the Match in his very first league start. Three-time All-Star defender Padraic Maher was unceremoniously whipped off in the 68th minute after gifting possession away twice at crucial stages.
Tipperary’s greatest modern comeback came in the summer of 2014, when the same two players were key in a rousing turnaround, turning a sizeable second-half deficit into an emphatic nine-point win.
It felt like a watershed moment, as Brendan Maher himself later admitted. ‘There was relief and satisfaction of winning a game like that,’ he admits, ‘coming back from being six points down. People questioned our character but you cannot get more character than that.’
ESPECIALLY coming after the National League final against Kilkenny and the Munster championship game against Limerick had gone against Tipperary in familiar, edge-ofthe-seat circumstances.
‘At least we are getting into position to win those games so what are they going to say about the rest of the teams?’ he responded. ‘We can’t be doing all that bad if we’re getting into a position to win a game.’
History would be so different if Hawk-Eye hadn’t ruled John O’Dwyer’s late free wide in the All-Ireland final against Kilkenny but then, Tipperary’s tally of 1-28 really should have been enough to win.
Tipperary’s record against Kilkenny has been used as the biggest stick to beat the current generation with, only winning twice in the last 13 meetings.
It’s interesting that the two times they’ve beaten Kilkenny, it’s by sizeable margins (eight points in the 2010 All-Ireland and a 12-point rout in the League last year).
Goalkeeper Darren Gleeson took flak for hitting a late free out over the line when trying to find a free man in space in extra-time in the 2014 League final but it was the right decision — just his execution let him down slightly.
Losing the game was down to the outfield players not being alert to TJ Reid who had spent the spring chip- ping sideline balls short into players’ hands. He found Richie Hogan who brilliantly disguised his return handpass to Reid who hit the winner to beat Tipperary — again.
Gleeson, who finished the year an All-Star, recalled the sense of hurt on the field immediately after. ‘My memories of that is meeting my sister who has been living in England for 21 or 22 years, I met her on the field after. They came over for the League final. The look on her face, I kind of knew that obviously I’d made a mistake, right, but then I met the manager [Eamon O’Shea] five minutes later. He said to me “if you’re in the position again, I’d expectation you to do the same thing”.
‘Because I’d done the right thing in terms of how we want to play the game, I just didn’t execute. I knew after that I’d made the mistake but you’d hear for a long time “drive it long” but I wanted to win the game.
‘If I launched it 90 yards down the field, a high ball into Kilkenny backs, we know the history there of where it would end up.’
Fine margins. It would do Tipperary’s confidence good to come out the right end of a close one today.