Canning is insufferable. He hasn’t shut his loud fucking stupid trap for a decade. I can’t bear him. I’d rather go to the dentist than listen to the cunt.
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Gleeson was 6 foot 4 and dominant as a minor and had physical advantages all the way up. Hurling was easy he was so dominant. He never had to learn a different way and could use his athleticism to win games.
He’s playing senior now and lads are as strong and fast as him. He doesn’t know any other way
Read what you wrote there. That’s exactly the problem.
Brian Lohan seems a thoroughly decent man.
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A Galway back gave away a free yesterday and Ger with his verbose vocabulary says something along the lines of “The Galway back has been indicted for that foul”
Just fuck off, Ger.
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Bad as Daly with his “and higarty there turning on the back burners”
At least Daly pauses for breath.
No crowd sound really underlines , as if it was needed, just how utterly grating canning is though. He’s appalling.
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I know 100%. Not sure how you get him more involved.
That’s the point. He could get more involved but strolls around the place.
That’s harsh. Hes planned for. If teams left him on his own he’d beat you on his own. He’s generally covered up on
Nah.
So teams don’t plan for aussie Gleeson?
Jaysus mate
Not what im saying and its too late to lady bird it for you.
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In what way? It’s been about 4 seasons since I’ve seen a team go out of their way to try and stop him or detail their main man marker to pick him up.
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3 points from play from 6 or 7 possessions in a game isn’t enough from Gleeson. 3 points from play would be fine, if he was heavily involved in general play and driving the team on and creating scores for others. The fact that Cahill took him off was quite telling. He even scored that excellent second half point from hanging back out of the way.
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Do teams plan for Tony Kelly? Of course teams try stop Gleeson. Gleeson does fuck all to counter act it though.
Gleeson isn’t anywhere near Tony Kelly’s level.
Certainly not workrate wise.
Kelly has been marked out of games as well.
Numerous times. Was he lazy those days he was?
Bringing the same drive to the bainisteoir’s bib
Liam Cahill believes that his own experiences as a player have prepared him well for management
DERMOT CROWE
It was June 1997 that we last met, when he was 19, in his second season with the Tipperary senior hurlers. Limerick awaited, the previous year’s All-Ireland finalists and Munster champions, in the provincial semi-final in Thurles a few days later.
He was a bit of a boy wonder. On his debut the previous year he scored 1-2 in a win over Waterford at Walsh Park, the day Ken McGrath also made his first appearance in the championship. A county minor at 15, he fitted seamlessly into a forward line of luminous names like English, Ryan and Leahy. Even in that company he thrived and by the end of the year he was an All Star.
The headline over the piece that appeared following that first meeting read ‘Driven by Hurling’ and the picture accompanying it, by Kenneth O’Halloran, had Liam Cahill out in the fields at home in Ballingarry jumping a fence with a hurl in his hand and the world at his feet. Not that the future panned out as he might have expected.
Twenty three years is an eternity in hurling terms. The boy has turned into a man in his 40s. He’s married to Emer, a daughter of Len Gaynor, and they have four children. They moved into a new house built on the land near Cahill’s family residence in Lickfinn 11 years ago. This is home now. For him it always was.
He remembers the photo. "I remember my father saying to me, ‘Could you not have picked a better field?’ Twas full of dock leaves and ragworth at the time. ‘Could you not have taken him to a field that was some way respectable’, he said.” And he starts laughing.
He is as informal now as he was then. Not that he’s a saint or a soft touch or hasn’t burned bridges. But he will still welcome you into his house a few days before playing Limerick, as he did back then when most people were more relaxed about allowing that kind of access. Twenty three years on, Limerick loom again, only this time his allegiance is pledged to Waterford, and the player is now a manager. Who would have predicted that? Where has the time gone?
If you were to say to him as a 19-year-old that he’d have the senior county career he did, he’d have shook his head in disbelief. A few days later they beat Limerick well but lost to Clare in the Munster final and lost again to Clare in the All-Ireland final, when he scored a goal in a comeback that fell just short.
When they won in 2001 he was on the fringes. When Ken Hogan took over he was deemed surplus to requirements. He returned at nearly 30, after three years out, following a call from Babs Keating. But he wasn’t the same player. And that year, 2007, he dipped his toe into management, helping to guide a star-studded minor team to win the All-Ireland. His inter-county playing career was over.
He’s been asked "several times” about a Tipp journey that had an impressive take-off but soon started losing altitude.
"I think it has prepared me better for management. To watch for fellas like that who come on the scene. I suppose the one regret I have is I always had an issue with poor performances, and how you move on from them. There will be days, the best of players have days, when things go wrong, but the real good players, the real consistent players, learn to deal with it quickly and move on to the next match. And that probably at the time for me was an area where I was found wanting. And as a result, your performances would suffer because you’re carrying baggage from the last match.
"Then your body language is affected. And you are a manager looking in at a guy and all of a shot he’s not the same player. At that time there was no questions asked. You either performed or you didn’t, someone else came in. Now you have people in support roles who look to be able to identify those areas and give you support to help your performance.”
Nicky English was his third manager, someone he’d played with in his first year in '96 which coincided with English’s last. Cahill was taken off at half-time in the 2000 Munster quarter-final against Waterford and in the semi-final against Clare he was brought on and taken off again.
"It happens now,” he says, "but it wasn’t the thing then. It was fully justified to be fair. Whatever happened, I remember the first two or three balls that came in I just couldn’t get to the pitch of it. It was too tight of a game. That was one game that flattened me really.
"That’s why in hindsight it’s a pity. People will say to you, you should grasp it while it’s there, cos it’ll be gone. There is no truer saying than that. When it’s there you have to embrace it. Because when it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no going back. You should never have regrets.”
You do? "Ah I would have yeah. I wasn’t a brilliant player but I thought I could have been better than I was. Now I loved the club scene. I used to love playing for my club. I thrived when I was asked to take things on. At county level I thought I could have delivered a bit more personally and for Tipp. I thought I fell short one or two days when Tipp really needed me to come to the table. But then at the time you had great players coming as well. I had three or four years where I was fairly sure of breaking into the team, and then the likes of (Eoin) Kelly and (Lar) Corbett were coming behind you.”
An early lesson in dealing with fame came only two days after he collected his All Star in 1996. He was back home playing for Ballingarry in a south Tipp semi-final when he lost four front teeth.
"I probably needed to get my head around it a bit quicker than I did. Now that you are showing you are capable of performing you are going to meet a bit more attention. It was a quick learning curve for me now. It’s one now that in your management career you’d be conscious of young fellas that are coming on the scene that I suppose you’d be able to educate them in the pitfalls that come.”
But it was some transition, from All Star and smiles on Friday to four teeth knocked out of your head on a Sunday in south Tipp. He didn’t mope. "I was never mollycoddled at home. You were always told to get on with things. I know that sounds a bit ‘dinosaur-ish’ now in the modern day but that time it happened, I had a perfect set of teeth at the time. And there was quite a bit of damage done to them and suddenly you go from having a perfect set of teeth to having a denture for the rest of your life at 19 years of age. Twas a fairly grounding experience to say the least.
"But you dealt with it and you got on with it. You just said that you were going to protect yourself that bit better in the future. I’d no issue with what happened after. I often played against the same opposition, on several occasions, but I aways made sure I protected myself a bit better than I did that day.”
He played the following Sunday.
When they played Wexford in the All-Ireland semi-final the next year, claiming a huge win over the reigning All-Ireland champions, he came off the bench for the last 20 minutes and left the dentures in the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms. In the madness following the final whistle they went missing.
"I went back in the dressing room after and no tracksuit and no dentures. So I went 48 hours without the dentures. But thankfully somebody dropped them back into the Park Avenue (hotel in Thurles) that time where the team used to go. There was no tracksuit dropped back, but the teeth were dropped back (laughs). So I never got to officially thank anyone for that. Whoever took the tracksuit they were welcome to it.”
Ask others about Liam Cahill’s management style and nature and the same things crop up. Direct. No-nonsense. Honest. Straight. Driven. A bit old school.
"I know people have talked about me being a relatively young manager but a traditionalist,” he says. "It’s been said to me a couple of times. I’d have no problem saying I am, I’m 100 per cent a traditionalist, but I am also very open, to be able to move with the times as well.”
His outlook is a composite of multiple influences. Traditionalism can be seen as hokey and dated but there is knowledge to be found anywhere you care to look. "Ah, like, I learned an awful lot from traditionalists. Proper traditionalists. Like Len Gaynor. Michael Doyle. Fr Tom Fogarty. They were all traditional Tipperary hurling managers. Nicky (English), when he came in, he brought a different flair to it but a lot of his values were back to traditional thinking as well. I would have got a lot of my values that I have now from good managers like that.
"You see these self-promoting guys, coaches, putting up their cvs and all their tactical forums online. And some people let you believe that they come up with this themselves. I don’t believe that. You might reinvent something you’ve seen already or change it or tweak it, but all I can say is any knowledge I have to date is from watching good men that I played under or had admiration for from the outside looking in and watching what they do and learning from their different types of style and trying to get my own patterns off of that.”
In 2007, the year Babs Keating brought him back into the Tipp panel, he was asked onto the county minor management team under Declan Ryan. "I felt after winning the minor All-Ireland the buzz was almost as good as being a player and winning it yourself,” says Cahill. "It kind of gave me confidence that I might have something to offer here. My passion always was around development at underage and helping fellas along and getting fellas ultimately to fulfil their potential, maybe where I fell short myself.”
From there he had a spell with Clonoulty-Rossmore, helping them reach a county final in 2011, and then moved across the border to Carrickshock. They made it to the 2013 Kilkenny senior final but lost to a late Lester Ryan goal against Clara. In 2014 he took over the Tipp minors. A loss to Limerick led on to a heavy defeat by Clare and elimination. The lesson left its mark.
"I hadn’t my ducks in a row, my work put in, and I feel I let down that bunch of players at that particular time. That’s the one regret I have out of the whole underage scenario. I definitely failed that bunch in 2014. I wouldn’t have any issues if the Tipp County Board had to say to me, Liam, thanks, good luck. I said in the dressing room after getting beaten by Clare that if I was to continue in this capacity this will never happen to me again. Whatever about getting beaten it will never happen me that I will get beaten out of lack of preparation.”
He was trying to manage and coach, and the next year he brought in Michael Bevans to coach so he could focus on managing. In four years with the minors they reached the All-Ireland final in 2015 and won the championship a year later.
In 2015 the Tipp minor football team also reached the final, with eight dual players alternating between the two codes. Cahill eventually became stridently opposed to a dual policy. He argued that he was not anti-football, as was claimed, but felt that the dual approach penalised both codes.
"The reality was that it just couldn’t work for those individuals, with the workload that was on them. That’s where I was coming from. Like I could not understand why football people in Tipp couldn’t get their head around this because it was actually of benefit to them for me to release a fella who wasn’t good enough or maybe not able to step up to play minor hurling but was good enough to play minor football. Tipp is a massive county and there’s plenty of talent out there. Develop the fellas who have football as their first love and hurling as their first love. There’s nothing to say that when they reach 21 or 22 that that can’t change.”
Heading into 2016 he put his foot down and called in the parents to explain his position. "I gave them the opportunity for them to sit down with their son and make the call themselves. No pressure from me. They had a choice.”
In 2016 Colin English had opted for football but after they went out of the championship he joined the hurling panel. "He got man of the match in the 2016 All-Ireland final and later went on to captain Tipp in an under 21 All-Ireland hurling final,” says Cahill. "So for someone to say I was anti-football was wrong.”
In 2018 and '19 he managed Tipp to All-Ireland titles at under 21 and under 20. In the first year they recovered from a 13-point defeat to Cork to beat the same opposition in the All-Ireland final, a welcome boost for the county in a poor year for the senior team. Already he was being talked about as a potential senior manager, but Liam Sheedy’s return delayed that. Instead, Waterford leaped.
The incoming chairman Seán Michael O’Regan phoned him while he was attending a friend’s wedding. What thoughts were circulating in his head? That they had "eight to ten” well established players, as good as anywhere. That they had been "there or thereabouts” a few years previously. Why had they gone back? What was the cause? What could he do to change that? Could it be a step too far?
How could be resist. Carriganore, the training centre, is a 45-minute drive. "It was a challenge. That’s the bottom line. A real challenge. And it came at a good time for me as well. I said, ‘I am five or six years trying to develop young players. Maybe it is time for me to start developing myself’. So I said, you know, maybe the fit is right.”
He met all the players individually. He went to as many club games as he could. He cut several from the existing panel, including high-profile names like Noel Connors, the 2019 captain, and Maurice Shanahan.
"You have to call it as it is. Say, look, you are not part of my plans initially. That’s the plan I am going with. They are not easy. It was done to me as a player. As a player you are saying ‘what have I done or not done to deserve this?’ In fairness they were very respectful. There was a lot of shock involved I suppose for some of them.”
Whenever he thought of Waterford in the past he thought of a team that always had a chance. He is developing a more cavalier style of play that many would see as befitting the old county traditions. A humiliating Munster final defeat by Tipp forced Derek McGrath to alter that course with a tactical reconfiguration designed to shore up their defence.
"My vision of the current crop of players I have is that I have the confidence in them to express themselves and go toe-to-toe with whoever they meet,” says Cahill. "A lot of my teams play high-risk hurling. They take chances, they’re innovative, and sometimes you can concede scores but more times it works in your favour. I always came with the vision to Waterford that we were going to play high-risk hurling no matter what would happen. And a good attacking type hurling. We have players that can play that kind of a game.”
Altering that style isn’t done with a click of his fingers. "It’s like anything. As long as it’s working there’ll be no problems. But the day it’ll go wrong, we’ll be ready for that day too. We’re not naive enough to think that things won’t go wrong.”
But he is here to win things. "If I leave Waterford, whenever it’ll be, with no silverware well then for me I would find that my tenure would not be a success. I’ve always said that to the players. Ultimately, an All-Ireland — if possible.”
He’s made a great start, with a win over Cork. But Limerick is the acid test for all teams. And a good start, as he knows more than anyone, is just that and no more.
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Gleeson won hurler of the year in 2016 when he was 21. He has made fuck all progression since then. There was no reason at this stage he couldnt be at that level.
In spite of that, the comparison wasnt that he is like Tony Kelly. It was the assumption that teams plan to nullify Gleeson and it works. Teams plan to nullify lots of players and opponents, however many players do things to get into the game and contribute, whereas Gleeson seems happy to potter about with a couple of points and go take sidelines.
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