2016 All Ireland Hurling & Camogie Finals

Sport
1624

Armagh started a fight with Cavan in the parade in 2014. They went on to win the match and have their only good championship season in the last 8 years.

Another example of a team starting an incident before a game and going on to win.

1625

I guess a non sports related example would be Martin Johnson refusing to move to another side of a carpet in Lansdowne Rd a number of years ago. The Oirish and the brave and faithful duly got their arses kicked up and down Dublin 4.

1 Like
1626

Who has said that?

Are you trying to construct a straw man because you’re losing an argument?

1627

Thats it. It was simply a role reversal of last years semi.

And uncanningly like mens '06 final. Corks tried & trusted system was dismantled.

1628

Alf stewart did.

1629

There is no argument here. Pretty sure i am the only one with direct experience on this subject.

1630

He did achieve his potential. Thats as good as he was. He was a classy Footballer and had a fine career with Limerick in that code

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1631

He didn’t say that, you read what he said completely out of context and his point flew entirely over your head.

1632

Ya cool.

Carry on. You are the expert in preparing for big games.

:rollseyes:

1633

This is the argument.

All sports have a mental battle element, duh. The point is, I’ve given a list of several teams who “took their their eye off the prize” as you put it and engaged in similar shenanigans to what the Cork camogie team did, and won.

England 2003 rugby
Mayo 2006 football
Armagh 2014 football

These type of shenanigans are not necessarily the preserve of teams who have failed to prepare, winning teams who are properly prepared also use them as a tool to try and exert both mental and sometimes physical dominance over their opponents.

You spent the week before the Dublin-Kerry game telling us how Kerry had let Dublin become far too much of a mental obsession for them. As it turned out, Kerry got their preparation in pretty much all aspects spot on and came within a whisker of winning the game, only losing to one of the greatest team performances of all-time in Gaelic football.

1634

Is this what you’re reduced to? :grinning:

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1635

I would say Cork & Kerry are very similar. Both got alot right, but both missed a critical trick.

Sometimes it is only after the fact that we get the full story. Things like hunger are very hard to work on. They are intrinsic and an athlete will rarely, especially in team sport admit to not having it. So its one of those things that needs to be covered from a long way out. Cody & Gavin have this mastered theu competition for places.

Its arguable that Cork lost that in trying to maintain 2 strong squads. And thats the risk and for the overall betterment of the county its more than commendable. But it cost the seniors. Maybe they also believed too much that what worked last year woukd work again. But then why change? In a way, although building in year 1&2, it had worked for 4 years. They are after the fact onservations that good managemebt and coaches will learn from. But they are still arguable mistakes, reasons, factors. The problem is everyone takes it all so fucking personally. We sometimes can only learn as we go. Teams have lifespans. Dublin got caught out only 2 years ago. But they learned. Its very possibly Murray & Fitzmaurice will have learned enough this year to win next. I know match preperation cost Cork 3 years ago. There were things they simply had not prepared for. Thats sport.

Kerry are simply not as fit as dublin. Thats the bottom line. As to why has been debated to death. But that was the clear difference.

Its small things at the highest level.

1636

With you ya.

I have given my thoughts and clear reasonings, anecdotal and evidence backed, over a long period of time. You are a troll.

1637

Mayo come onto the pitch first for the All-Ireland football final. They go to the Hill 16 end for their warm-up, like in 2006.

We now have four possible narratives - the one used by the media will be determined by the result (as in 2006).

i) Dublin also go to the Hill 16 end for their warm up. Dublin go on to win the match.

Dublin will be portrayed as not having backed down and asserting their mental superiority over Mayo, playing a key role in their victory. Mayo will be portrayed as having “let their eyes slip from the prize” before the game has even started, and their defeat was thus inevitable.

ii) Dublin also go to the Hill 16 end for their warm up. Mayo go on to win the match.

Dublin will be portrayed as having shown an immaturity and impetuousness, and not having learnt from the 2006 match. Mayo’s ploy in going to the Hill 16 end will be portrayed as a master stroke and having played a key role in unsettling Dublin mentally, and thus having played a key role in their victory. It will have showed that they were not willing to be bullied by Dublin and will be portrayed as an assertion of a new mental toughness, that “this time it would be different”.

iii) Dublin see Mayo warming up at the Hill 16 end, but decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and instead go to the Canal End for their warm up. Dublin go on to win the match.

Dublin are seen as having “neutralised” Mayo’s foolish mental games in one stroke and"done their talking on the pitch". They are praised for having learned the lessons of 2006 and not fallen into the “trap” that had been set for them. They have shown an ability to react to circumstances and not let their “process” be disrupted. “Winners” don’t get involved in childish nonsense, losers do. Mayo are pilloried in the media, as in i).

iv) Dublin warm up at the Canal End. Mayo go on to win.

Dublin are portrayed as “having backed down in the face of a challenge”. Before the ball had been thrown in, Mayo held the psychological advantage and had rattled Dublin. It’s almost universally agreed that Dublin should have gone to the Hill 16 end and not “backed down”. Several former Dublin players write articles to this effect. Dublin are said to have been “wrongfooted” by mind games and their “aura” of invincibility is said to “have been well and truly broken”.

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1638

I think it’s pretty obvious who the troll is here, Kev.

I’ve put forward points which rebut the extremely simplistic black and white understanding of the role of psychology in sport that you have. Rather than engage with these points, you’ve completely ignored them and resorted to childish nonsense like the post quoted here.

It’s pretty clear you use this board as a sort of free proxy advertising service for your “business”. If I was a prospective client and saw some of the incoherent, impetuous, rambling nonsense you write here, I’d be steering well clear.

1 Like
1639

That is true, you could say he was a Kerry-style point-kicking corner forward. Also an all-round decent sort and involved as a coach with one of the underage football squads.

1 Like
1640

In the best tradition of Arrigle lists, you have left one out.

(v) Dublin arrange the scheduled timing for teams entering the pitch to ensure this shit does not happen again.

1641

Please post an example of an Arrigle list, pal.

1642

Here you go mate.

Great topic. But which do you mean, MS, lefthandders like Paul Kelly or leftthanders like Lar Corbett? It’d be a big distinction.

From what I’ve seen, there are six ways fellas hurl:

  1. Right hand on top, right-oriented (that is to say, they’d take a free or a sideline cut off their right): the great majority of lads.

  2. RHOT, left-orientated: Paul Codd, Richie Mullally, Eamon Kennedy, Paul O’Grady, Niall Gilligan, Alan Markham.

  3. LHOT, left-oriented: Declan Ryan, Ger Henderson, Pat Hartnett, Jimmy Doyle, Paul Kelly, Clem Smith.

  4. LHOT, right-oriented: Joe Cooney, J. J. Delaney, Brendan Lynskey, Lar Corbett, Brendan Cummins, Brendan Landers.

  5. RHOT to gather, LHOT to strike: Gary Kirby, Kevin Hennessy, Barry Foley.

  6. LHOT to gather, RHOT to strike: don’t remember seeing any prominent intercounty hurler work this way . Michael ‘Titch’ Phelan used do it as an underage hurler in Kilkenny, but was obviously got out of it with coaching.

There may be a 7th category for Gerry McInerney, though I don’t know what you’d term it…

3 Likes
1643

And might as well end it all now…

Topic: Thirty haphazard thoughts on August 17, 2003

  1. Ten days ago, as pleasantly hungover as I’ve ever been, I was wandering around the garden at home, entertaining my 20-month-old niece, Dianaimh. She is obsessed with insects and we had a very pleasant time watching the bees – many of them in black-and-amber livery – gorging themselves on the petunias. Red Admirals nearly drive her cracked.
  2. There are – if not many – things more important than hurling. After myself, Dianaimh’s mother would probably be the most fanatical of the eight of us: about, in general, Kilkenny hurling; about, in particular, the rivalry with Tipp. A good camogie player in her day, and still a great woman to shout on a sideline, she pointblank refused to live within Co. Tipperary when her husband gave some time in a GP practice in Carrick on Suir. Although much less convenient in several ways, she insisted on decamping for the six months to outer Carrickbeg. Her husband, a Sligoman (who played for them in the Connaught C’ship), was just a bit bewildered.

Always very fond of her, this insistence endeared her to me even more – bizarre as some will find that insistence. I hope the day will come when I’ll see their five-year-old son out in the black and amber of Lismore (and the white and blue of Waterford, maybe). He has good pedigree (and I get him, of course, tipping around out the back, to stop gripping LHOT since he’s right-handed and right-footed…). Even if their county doesn’t improve at camogie, there is high-level gaelic football for the two girls. As remarked before, I’ve come to a great liking for West Waterford.

Anyway: Sunday evening, elated at our victory, Dianaimh’s mother was driving home to Lismore, having left her three up for a few days. THEN: a drunken eejit drives straight out of a pub carpark in front of her, somewhere between Leamybrien and Cappoquin. The airbag and good decision-making saved her – non-inevitably – from serious harm. My blood went to proverbial cold when our mother told me on Monday afternoon, out of earshot of the older two, what had happened Sunday evening. Louder, much louder, the noise of bees.

Life is very fragile, especially in a car. August 17, 2003: could mean something far different in our family. Next time I’m there, I shall offer a prayer in Mullinakill that it doesn’t.

  1. That decision to live out in Carrickbeg was, in its small way, emblematic of the relationship that has obtained between the hurling cultures of Kilkenny and Tipperary: far more ‘pride and prejudice’, there, than ‘sense and sensibility’, as Mulcair so brilliantly put it. Longer ago than I now care to remember, I promised Exile and HOH that I’d put up my own take on Tipp hurling on AFR. I haven’t done so (and my sincere thanks to those who didn’t give me a hard time about that non-show). That’s not because I lacked material. Au contraire: ferocious amount of stuff hanging in the hard-drive, bent to that topic. The admirable irrationalism of local attachments is a fascinating question, all the way from Isaiah Berlin to Babs Keating. Please accept what follows as a sort of belated delivery on that hasty promise.

  2. What’s stalled me is the fact that my own attitude towards Tipp hurling has enormously changed over the twelve months or so that I’ve been contributing to GAA boards. Basically, I’ve had to invigilate my own prides and prejudices. Obviously enough, as ye’ll obviously have discerned, that reassessment has been prompted in large part by a great admiration for the knowledge and the intelligence half a dozen or so Premier contributors bring to hurling matters. Privately, several of them have been most gracious in the teeth of a terrible defeat. It’s also fair to say that Mulcair (who is Tipp to the absolute hilt, in all sorts of ways) will go down – or so I fervently hope – as one of the game’s great historians. I’m vain about my ability to spot excellence, whatever colours it wears. And Christy Ring was right: hurling without them is poorly clothed. If you love hurling, win or lose (and I wept bitter tears after ’91), days such as last Sunday week, as a very shrewd Tipp man said to me before the semi-final, are the days you want. A version of the sublime, I suppose. Wordsworth sums it up: “Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”.

  3. The emphatic nature of our victory was important as well as pleasing – important for future balanced debate about hurling’s future, as well. Had it been closer, there would have been talk of ‘Leinster hurling’s in-built advantage’, ‘three weeks off’, ‘Philip Maher’s injury’. All they could do, that not being the case, was drive for the exits.

While it is very difficult to envisage a goal such as Tommy Walsh’s one being scored on Maher’s watch, it is nigh impossible to imagine that Tipperary would have been good enough to do it even with Maher at no. 3. Sure enough, Paul Curran made a bad mistake for Walsh’s goal. But it is important to remember Mulcair’s argument about Galway-Tipperary in 1989: Sean Treacy was the Westerners’ best man. Likewise, Curran has been one of Tipp’s most solid performers since May. It was also good to see Eamonn Corcoran hurl – and hurl so well – after the extremely raw deal he received earlier in the year.

If we’d won by two points, say, then there might have been some rationale for certain patter – ‘Leinster hurling’ and all that jezzetry (such nonsense, anyway, was scutched by the stats put up on ch.com by Lory 1 and others) – but a 12-point defeat (that could easily have been a 20-point defeat) truncates. Sneer about Wexford, however much you like. But they could genuinely feel that 11 points flattered the Kilkenny performance

  1. To their discredit (certainly as regards their credibility as hurling analysts), certain individuals came on here after the Leinster Final and spoke of Wexford as on a par with Tranmere United, Exeter City and such like. Though some of those individuals were from Co. Waterford, soccer analogies, in the wake of Wexford’s victory in Nowlan Park, were noticeably thin on that Monday’s ground. To our credit, no-one from Kilkenny came on here last week comparing Tipperary to Yeovil Town. We’ve seen the good days and the bad days. We remember what it felt like in 2001. Things can go for you on the day, as they did for us on August 17th – and as they didn’t for our opponents. Though we are better at the moment, we are not twelve points better a team than Tipperary (I forecast a seven-point margin, egging a bit due to player-manager friction). We should know that to be the case. Hopefully, that recognition will be an important resource over the next few years: we are better than no-one unless we beat them well, such is the ever-circling scorn of ‘Leinster hurling’.

  2. Had Tipp beaten us, I would have hoped they’d go all the way. That sort of shocked me about myself – and has nothing to do with Cork’s tilt of 28 titles. That’s to do with grappling with Mulcair’s fundamental point: there are no two counties more alike than Kilkenny and Tipperary. Also, Cork’s preening this summer has really got on my wits.

  3. Why do people so dislike Tipperary and Tipperary hurling? That’s the core point and the one that gets backs up. I mean: in comparison to Cork hurling and Kilkenny hurling. I mean: in comparison to Kilkenny hurling, in particular. I’ve thought about this issue a lot, especially after I was a bit too quick to promise (and to repromise) that AFR post. Until I went to England, I thought intense dislike of Tipperary was a Kilkenny thing (most of my friends in UCD weren’t GAA people – though dislike of Tipp was certainly evident in UCG). Then, going into Setanta pubs and so on, I found that Tipp hurling was intensely disliked by lads from Donegal as well as by lads from Galway. You will find no stronger admirers of Kilkenny hurling, by the way, than the Connemara men.

  4. It has to be the followers, since Tipperary is a great republican county and should naturally, on that foot alone, be a delight in GAA circles (much of Kerry’s pan-appeal, I suspect, derives from the ‘Munster Republic’ ticket): “Bad losers and worse winners”, as the father says (though that has changed a good bit post-’87, I’d say: certainly, young Cork fans seem to covet the mantle of overbearing conceit). Colombia rather than David Trimble is probably representative now (though Trimble hasn’t gone away, you know).

  5. Still, I remember the League quarter-final in ’94, when Pat O’Neill first evinced what was to become of his ‘career’. Michael Cleary was standing over a 65, the game well won. Arsa a Tipp lad in his fifties, beside me: “Puck it wide Cleary! Puck it wide, and don’t be humiliating them altogether!” I’ve never come across that vein in so embedded a fashion in any other county. It is very unattractive. When I lived in Galway for a spell, a couple of years before that match, I once, blitzed one night, downstairs in The Castle, hooked up with a very fetching wan from Golden or thereabouts: she just came over and presented me with a purple lollipop. Back in Corrib Village, I noticed she had a Tipp jersey on the wardrobe door: a first cousin had played U21. I made her put it on when she’d taken everything else off. She didn’t demur. And so I will always associate the number 12 with Galway’s particular pleasures.

  6. It was remarkable to read the comments after the semi-final of Gunther – an admirable admirer of Coreahln – in this regard. “Why are people grudgeful?”: so Mark E. Smith has it. Equally: why do people so hate Tipp? It can’t be the clamour of success, really, this long time. My own place has been much the most successful hurling county in the lifetime of the vast majority of people who use this board. Kinvara’s Passion started a thread just after last Christmas about the popularity of individual counties. It was remarkable how well Kilkenny fared by comparison with Tipperary and Cork. Why so?

  7. I’m not bringing up these thematics so as to snig. One time, I admit, that would have been a strong impulse. It must be the followers – and the ghosts given voice through them. One recent contributor on PVDF – with whom I have no personal beef whatsoever: better out than in, as I’ve long said, about controversial posts – laments the fact that Tommy Walsh and Eddie Brennan weren’t at least “timbered” on August 17th. Better to go down with two men sent off, festooned with the pleasure of watching impotent bullying (who in the current Tipp backs would risk timber – or would desire to essay timber to anyone, in fairness? – with Henry, Dougal or Gorta? answers on a postcard to Holycross…). That would be more echt Tipp – or so it goes from one of their own.

  8. I made some loose remarks during the summer and was, correctly, pulled up on them. So it seems to me that when Tipperary folk wonder about their hurling’s lack of popularity, they have to ponder the acceptability in their culture of remarks – no Tipp man had objected to it, last time I looked – such as the one noted above. Did anyone come on a GAA board after Galway beat us fair and square in 2001 and regret that Kevin Broderick didn’t receive a few right flakes, once the game was definitely lost? In fact, a Williamstown friend of mine says his admiration for Kilkenny hurling went up tenfold when Eamonn Kennedy didn’t crease Broderick – as he so easily could have done – and Broderick doing his showboating ‘flick over the head’-type stuff. That’s not to say the current Kilkenny team, as Mulcair notes in his end-of-term report, is shy of using the the physical side of things. Not at all: which is obviously occasioning highly complicated feelings in Tipperary circles.

  9. Sean O’Faolain wrote in THE IRISH (1947) of the near singular culture to be found in Co. Kilkenny, especially in the Nore and Barrow Valleys. Here, beneficially, the Norman influence most sweetly flowered: “In such counties as Kilkenny, where this influence lasted long and was least disturbed, even by the disastrous upheaval of the Reformation, the very nature of the people is patently different to that of the contiguous county of Tipperary.” Tony O’Malley, one of Kilkenny hurling’s great followers, used speak of the county’s fundamental attraction as a legacy of its amalgam of Norman and Gael. Kilkenny people, it seems to me, and especially South Kilkenny people, are fierce easy-going. Possibly, that’s the convergence of cultures. You have the obvious Norman cast of an environs like Kells. Then there is the Gaelicist overlay of parishes such as Tullogher-Rosbercon and Mullinavat, places amongst the last in which Gaelic was spoken in Leinster. Often enough, I have coveted the sort of ruthlessness that ushered Tipperary hurling to its greatest days, doubting, at least so far as hurling is concerned, the Norman finesse. The 1964 A-I Final was closer than people now think. It was simply that, once Ollie made a key mistake, spooning a ball into the net, Tipp, in the specific shape of Donie Nealon, put them to the sword. There will, I suspect, be no greater admirers to be found than in Mid Tipp, however hunched and silent their demeanour, of Kilkenny’s ruthlessness on August 17, 2003.

  10. It is – needless to say, I hope – very much to Tipperary’s credit that they didn’t ‘lower the blade’ when the game had gone away from them last Sunday week. We’ve seen other counties go that road in the not-so-distant past. Their refusal, of course, is in large part a legacy of Babs Keating’s reign: ‘the five Ss’. Fair play, in all senses. And no serious Premier follower, while they obviously should be concerned at the near ubiquitous implosion of team-spirit, should lament the passing of any such imperative or any such individual impulse. Ye had to drop Sharkey to win an A-I.

  11. Always the stock dig at Tipp, of course: systematic dirt. I was reared on that shovel. A few months ago, I had the great pleasue of spending some hours in Tony Wall’s company. He is an enormously impressive individual and it was very easy to see how he became Paddy Leahy’s righthand man. Now, you would have to take seriously someone like Ned Power, especially at the remove of four decades on, still wishing to deem John Doyle et al. “amateur terrorists”. It’s an extraordinary phrase. Nor can Power’s assessment be deemed sour grapes, the bitterness of someone who never saw his team defeat Tipperary in the C’ship.

I’ve no doubt that Tipperary teams in their classic era, especially in the fullback line, were fearsome in the physical stakes. Wall named a Sarsfields and Premier colleague of his as the dirtiest man, in his opinion, he ever saw play. Yet the same man was never even booked once in his career and was a gentleman off the field.

Wall made a very coherent point to me about Tipp’s supposedly unsavoury tactics (he raised the topic, since it obviously still irked him): if Tipperary were so dirty, why did they concede so few frees?. The Munster Final of 1963 aside, this observation, so far as I am aware, is a fair one. In fact, he told me that their gameplan for the ’64 A-I Final was very straightforward: deny Eddie Keher the sort of opportunities from placed balls Waterford had gifted him the year before. That gameplan certainly succeeded. Furthermore, Mick Burns – who was, as Wall pointed out, conceding over a stone in weight to his immediate opponent – hardly gave Keher a puck.

Tipperary weren’t angels, by any manner of means. Yet they weren’t the only ones. As a young fella of eleven or so, I remember the father telling me of a time he gave working in Dunmore East. Babs Keating arrived in to them one day in the lorry. Talk, of course, turned to hurling. After a bit, Babs lifted up his shirt to show them how, in a recent League match, Pa Dillon had absolutely scurged him with the handle of the hurl. I’ve always found that a haunting moment.

Probably, in fairness, a lot of animus against Tipperary on the basis of their supposed unsavoury tactics issues from a simple fact: success. If Kilkenny had won 5 titles in 8 years (and it could easily have been a greater haul still), what would be said of them? Certainly, the ’63 fullback line of Fan Larkin, Cha Whelan and Martin Treacy wasn’t there for the elan and panache of their strokeplay. Equally, people love to sneer about Tipp going out of it when ‘hurling with helmets’ came into it. But how do we account for Wexford’s slump? From what I’ve heard, Keher preferred to play Premier backs than to encounter some of the Model boys. Also, who could forget the cowardly blow Pat Delaney received in the 1969 A-I Final?

It must be the followers, so.

We have so much for which to thank Fr Tommy Maher. A statue should go up in Gowran at the appropriate time. One of the main occasions of gratitude must be that, scenting the way hurling was going, Fr Tommy reorganized Kilkenny’s style of defence post-1965.

Of that period’s teams, only Waterford could claim that they tried to hurl at every point in the field.

  1. What are ‘traditional’ counties for? It seems important to ask. We can’t ever claim that we are ‘due’ an All-Ireland, obviously enough. Therefore it seems to me that the so-called ‘Big Three’ should particularly look to pressing the envelope of achievement: putting things back to back, winning things in a row. To an extent, though I wouldn’t have said so at the time, it’s kind of unfortunate that Tipperary didn’t win the three-in-a-row that was within their capabilities between 1989 and 1991. The same, mutatis mutandis, could be said of Clare between 1995 and 1998 – and to the nth degree, since such a fiat would have immediately catapulted them into a very select category (I’m mindful here, too, of Mulcair’s point about the significance of Offaly’s missed opportunity for a two-in-a-row in ’95). As a result of having to go back for a three-in-a-row to 1978 – neolithic times, for most, it seems – this current Kilkenny outfit’s ambitions seem stalled at a two-in-a-row. Excellence breeds excellence, even at a remove. However funny it will seem to give this opinion, Tipperary’s failure to achieve a three-in-a-row in ’91 – along with, of course, the failure by Kilkenny to do so in ’94 – probably hinders the ambition of current teams. Had Tipp won in 1990, it would, in a funny way, if we manage to beat Cork on September 14th, make it more rather than less likely than we’d do a three-in-a-row in 2004.

I get this way of looking at things from two factors, I think: (a) being a county boy from Ballyhale: intimate ambitions; and (b) being a devotee of Walter Benjamin’s writings: the flower that is rising in the sky of history by dint of “secret heliotropism”.

  1. It’s always important, especially when you win well, to look at the counter-arguments. So, at any rate, I tried to do last September in ‘The Year of the Cat’. Journalism has correctly instanced John Carroll’s poor striking when an obvious goal chance beckoned at the start of the second half. Tipp wouldn’t have won, any more than Wexford did. But he should have slotted it. It’s also fair to say that Peter Barry could have got a red card for the wild pull he drew at Conor Gleeson in the first half (drawing “smoke” out of his ankle, in Mulcair’s memorable phrase). If not malicious, it was reckless. And anything, if you’re reckless, can happen.: you must own it, in all senses. It would have been harsh for Barry to get the line – especially after some of the uncensured swipes Darren Stamp has essayed this summer – but it was a hinge that went our way. Equally, Eamonn Corcoran’s brilliant pass to Eoin Kelly probably deserved to end in a goal. Referees need to be consistent about these quck puck-outs.

  2. August 17, 2003 must give more glory to Nicky English. It is increasingly clear, as I said a long time ago, that he extracted the maximum out of a very uneven group of players, a group in which there was a big gulf between an excellent half a dozen or so and the following ten or so. I grew up with the merit of 1963’s win being queried. Tipperary’s victory in 2001 now looks rather different for not having met us in the course of that year. However he did it, English made purses out of sows’ ears (Tom Costello, David Kennedy, Lar Corbett) and got average enough hurlers (Paul Ormond, Mark O’Leary, John Carroll, Brian O’Meara) to hurl very well. Damien Fitzhenry did them a big favour, you have to think.

  3. I said privately to a Tipp acquaintance that I was sort of delighted when Michael Doyle got the manager’s job, since I reckoned it made a Premier A-I less rather than more likely. That conviction came from a number of factors. It weighed with me that Exile didn’t fancy him, having had him close at hand in Nenagh. It also seemed, from everything you heard, that his style would be very different to that of Babs and Nicky, both of whom were very much players’ men. That spelled trouble, in my book. And so it proved. It might be right or it might be wrong to take this or to to take approach with players. Pride in the jersey should be enough, as Mulcair pressed, whoever’s in charge.

End of day, though, the ne plus ultra is to get the maximum out of your players. English – ever more clearly – did that. Doyle hasn’t. I queried before the Clare match and before the semi-final whether the players would ‘die’ for Doyle on the pitch. They didn’t, either day. Have a look at Tommy Walsh’s goal on video. Keep your eye on the top of the screen. Look at Tommy Dunne ambling back. Look at Tommy Dunne come to a halt, whilst Eamonn Corcoran is frantically trying to intervene. Look at Dunne stand still, even though he could easily have got back to hook – one of his great skills, after all – Walsh’s scoring stroke.

It doesn’t seem to me that a man described in Keating’s autobiography as a reluctant trainer – as well being fond of a drink and a heavy smoker – is very well placed to urge anyone, least of all twenty-something hurlers, to greater efforts and sacrifices. Tellingly, Keating said that Doyle could have done a job at centreback. Informed opinion in Tipp will have read that as a subtle twist of the knife. Lack of a coherent centreback was probably the single greatest factor in that Tipperary outfit not winning more titles.

And so I say: give Mr Doyle – who was, enjoyably, far from gracious in defeat – three more years. Doyle, as a Bruree friend of mine would have it, very seems a one-club golfer.

  1. Thomas Kuhn wrote a study called THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS (1962). The gist of this hugely influential work – which popularized, amongst other effects, the phrase ‘paradigm-shift’ – was that developments in science don’t follow a smooth evolutionary path. Often, they are disjunct and unanticipated. Changes, when it comes, oftten comes very quickly, if at all.

I feel that such a shift – unanticipatable just over 12 months ago – has now taken place between my county and its greatest rival. And I feel that the reach of that alteration was facilitated by a son of Holycross being in charge. Had we lost, it would have been all the more searing for the implicit ‘back to the future’-type aspects which would have attended the defeat – aspects to which certain Tipp fans would not, understandably, have been slow to give explicit articulation.

  1. The same, of course, is true in reverse. There were men of a certain vintage around me hoarse with shouting about 1964, 20 minutes of the second half gone. One of the brothers, sitting above me in the Upper Hogan, overheard an instructive cameo from a Kilkenny supporter of the same vintage, Tipp support driving in droves for the exits: “Close the gates! Don’t let the fcukers out! Make ’em watch it!” It was notable – and very surprising, given the blandness with which any opinion is typically ventured in his journalism – that John Knox revealed Paddy Prendergast’s pre-match opinion last Wednesday: Kilkenny would win easy. Another player who played in the forwards on the ’82-’83 outfit – someone not in the slightest known for bullishness or swagger – gave exactly the same opinion as he made his way around the county on foot of his work in the week before the game.

  2. Such conviction on the part of two ex-players is very striking. It will filter down. It seems the traditional dread of Tipperary has gone, evaporate before the heat of last year’s C’ship win and this year’s League Final. The latter match was particularly important, I believe. Perception is as important as fact, having like agency. Traditionally, that was a match – or so traditional perception, however skewed, went – Tipp would have won: not entirely deserved, not clearly the better hurlers, but nevertheless garnering the prize through a mighty finishing kick in which mental resolve, physical power and deft skills were plaited into a noose for brittle ambition. As John Doyle said to Tom Walsh after a big turnaround in a non-C’ship encounter, unimportant save for its broadening of the pattern: “Fcuk it Walsh, ye’ll never beat us!”

  3. Tipp didn’t, last Sunday week, really seem to believe that they could win. Rather like 1991 in reverse, in fact. Of the many wonderful elements which conjoined on August 17th, this is the one that pleases me most. A paradigm has shifted. That ex-player I mentioned is of the opinion that history is going to be rewritten over the next decade: we will meet Tipperary a lot (especially given the presence of the ‘backdoor’); we will, all in all, be stronger in that period; and we will, ball and ball, beat them a lot.

  4. Wouldn’t go that far myself. But the fact that such an opinion occurs to a sober and knowledgeable individual speaks for itself as to the magnitude of change in Noreside mindset. I have no fear of meeting Tipperary now. Respect and worry? Yes, assuredly – and ongoingly. But the fear – that was worth a goal start to Tipp, I reckon – is gone.

  5. I got a certain amount of flack for holding that Offaly could beat Tipperary. Fair enough. But I think the reasons I came to that view are now rather less eccentric. Rewatching the match at home before the semi-final, I was struck by how bullish Ger Loughnane was about the Faithful’s chances. They had the personnel – if they’d performed – to beat Blue and Gold. Big pity, since Offaly seem to stuck in a sort of mindset about Tipperary as obtained about Kilkenny in 1979. That is one of the notable points of the summer’s hurling.