Tipperary are well equipped to avoid that familiar cycle
A16-POINT hammering is as good a way as any for a team to call down the doubters. The sense is, though, that scepticism was never far away from Tipperary, hanging low above them like clouds over the Silvermines.
When they dissolved in the heat of Galway’s performance in the Allianz League final, the doubts broke over them, but even a more respectable surrender would have brought a swarm of questions.
This is Tipperary, after all. They do not transmit the invulnerability usually palpable in champions.
Where All-Ireland winners are presumed to be armoured by the confidence that comes with winning, there have been issues with triumphant Tipperary teams for generations now.
The last year they retained the Liam MacCarthy Cup was 1965. In total, they have won just six senior All-Irelands since then. They have long been established as one of hurling’s big three, but the greater amount of their glory was achieved in earlier days.
This has affected how Tipperary are perceived, and in this era the impression of them as unreliable has grown. They have suffered in comparison to the awesome age of Cody, and also to the Cork team of the 2000s.
The 2001 win under Nicky English was not built upon, and English left the job after their interest in the 2002 Championship concluded. The return of Babs Keating brought colour but chaos, and after Liam Sheedy built a Championship-winning side in 2010, professional commitments obliged him to leave the following winter.
Losing two such influential figures as English and Sheedy militated against any designs on sustained success, but the players haven’t helped themselves. Rumours of fecklessness hung like cobwebs around the 2010 winning squad, and even if they were exaggerated, there have been admissions since that the group failed to maintain the levels of application that made them the best team in Ireland.
‘Our players, if they searched deep inside their souls, could not claim to have ticked all the boxes. The box marked “Intensity” certainly wasn’t. The rawness and manic desire that stems from your subconscious wasn’t there in 2011,’ Brendan Cummins later wrote in his autobiography.
None of that uncertainty had pervaded discussion about Michael Ryan’s defending champions until they crumpled in the Gaelic Grounds last month, but the scale of the defeat has prompted reassessments of a side that looked equal parts mean and magnificent in winning the All-Ireland last September.
‘Same old Tipp’ is too easy a slur, but as they prepare to launch their defence in Semple Stadium this afternoon, their fallibility is fresh in people’s minds.
Former Cork hurler John Considine this week shared in public what many now wonder. ‘Of course Tipperary will be favourites. But I’d prefer to be on that side of it where you are going, “They are not the bigger men that people, maybe, thought they were”.
‘Tipperary’s performances, there’s a chink there. Was it overconfidence against Galway, or was it something else?’
That doubt will follow them in the parade around Semple Stadium today.
It is tremendous news for those of us outside looking in, because a predictable competition can become hard and stale. Considine’s comments will not be publicly supported by any player or mentor competing against Tipperary, but plenty of them will think that way, too.
Galway may not end this summer as the champions of Ireland but they have done the competition great service by making it seem much more open than it did after the first three rounds of the League.
Tipp beat Dublin by 16 points in their first League match. They had six points tospare against Waterford in round two, and had seven over Clare in the following series of matches.
They were eventually checked by a draw with Kilkenny as well as a one-point defeat to Cork in the final round of regulation matches, but they had long since qualified for the knock-out rounds. However, their spring is gauged by what happened on one day at the end of April.
That thrashing was enough to exhume many old ghosts that have haunted Tipperary, and it has also necessarily slowed the talk of a new dominant force rising through the game.
They were so impressive throughout last season, and especially in eviscerating Kilkenny in the final last September that predictions of an age of Tipperary rule were understandable.
Ryan’s first year in charge was wholly convincing, and the work done then is the most substantial counter-argument to those dismissals of same old Tipp.
The most significant work done by Ryan was in fitting out the team with the physical force needed to win in the modern age. Ronan Maher, Michael Breen and Dan McCormack brought the type of athleticism and lust for battle in tight spaces once only associated with football. That willingness to engage in physical tussles was introduced into hurling by Kilkenny, but under Ryan, Tipperary complemented it with the hurling skills of John O’Dwyer, Séamus Callanan and the McGrath brothers. Callanan and a stevedore with long service, Patrick Maher, are said to be injury worries for Ryan as they await Cork today, but even if that proves more than the usual gossip, neither will be long-term absentees, and the greatest consolation for Ryan should be that he has the same resources to call upon this summer as he had 12 months ago.
The final thrashing slowed talk of a new dominant force rising
This is not an old group, even accounting for those whose involvement dates back to the Sheedy years. They have, by a long way, the best squad of players around.
Waterford are smart and disciplined, Galway clever and as physical as Tipperary. Kilkenny and Cork both look significantly weaker.
For all the uncertainty kicked up like clouds of dust by their defeat in Limerick, the champions are still the strongest in the Championship. They are led by a good manager who knows exactly how he wants to play the game.
In James Barry, the Mahers Pádraic, Brendan and Patrick, and in Callanan, they have a ridge of experienced players familiar with both victory and the failure to build upon it running through the side.
Had they beaten Galway in the League final, Championship previews would be built upon discussions of how long Tipperary dominance will last.
Yet those 70 minutes cannot be ignored, because they introduced the possibility of Tipp stumbling in an old and unforgivable way. That is why there is more than the usual guff to the contention that losing to Galway could provide a long-term benefit to Ryan and his players.
It reminded them of the frailty of victory, of how abruptly and brutally it can come asunder.
In Roman times, a general returned in victory from far-flung battles would be permitted a victory parade, but as he received the acclaim of the people from his chariot, a slave was instructed to stand beside him. In the general’s ear he would whisper that all glory was fleeting.
The reminder of their mortality delivered to Tipperary was not so subtly packaged.
It could be equally effective though, imparting to his players in a way more direct than Ryan ever could the need to be mindful, and to never forget that everyone wants to beat them.
If they learn the lesson, then this season no one will.