In the first half of the 2019 All-Ireland final, when Kilkenny were on top and before Richie Hogan was sent off, Colin Fennelly was six paces from the Tipperary goal, hurley cocked, ready to fire. In the modern game, the imperative is to defend from behind; the most productive tackling comes from the next line back: full forwards on the opposition half backs, centre fielders on the opposition half forwards.
So, when Fennelly threw up the ball to strike, John McGrath tackled him. In the maelstrom of an All-Ireland final it was a tiny vignette of the modern game. The Kilkenny player wearing number 13 was tackled by the Tipperary 13 when, for generations, they would only have been seeing each other in the prematch parade.
What was McGrath doing there? How many lines did he pass to get there? Nobody asks those questions any more. For McGrath it was a matter of permission and responsibility. Why shouldn’t he be there?
Last Sunday, a couple of minutes before half-time, McGrath turned up inside the Tipperary 45 and hooked Cian Lynch. The Limerick captain is so nimble on his feet and so adept at quasi-legal hand passes and has such refined spatial awareness that he is scarcely ever hooked.
McGrath had touched the ball just once in the previous 20 minutes, but there are always ways to be useful. The oldest player on the Tipperary team travelled half the length of the pitch to force a turnover that, two passes later, led to a Tipp score.
In McGrath’s highlights reel from last Sunday there wasn’t room for subterranean stuff. After two blinding goals and one sumptuous point, the only question was where had he been for the last few years? Where was the player who had won an All Star in his breakthrough season, and two All-Irelands by his mid-20s?
Not forgotten. Not gone. Not in favour. Not the same.
“If you meet any hurling follower in Tipperary, and you’re talking about the team, John McGrath’s name will always come up,” says Tommy Dunne, the former Tipperary captain and coach. “‘I wonder how is he? I wonder where is he? I wonder how he is going? Wouldn’t it be great to see John McGrath?’ That’s how John McGrath is regarded in Tipperary.”
McGrath will be 31 in July. Before last Sunday, he hadn’t started a championship match for Tipperary since 2022, the day that he ruptured his Achilles tendon against Clare. The last time he started and finished a championship match was five years ago, against Limerick. Last summer, he appeared just twice, for a combined total of 40 minutes.
If he had retired after last season, or had been discreetly let go, nobody would have been surprised. Instead, he lit up the Tipp club championship again with Loughmore-Castleiney. Good judges will say that he has been the best club player in Tipp for the last five years and anybody who disagreed wouldn’t leave McGrath out of the top three. Nobody would have said that his brilliance had died. And yet, when the Tipp team was announced for the Limerick game, his inclusion blindsided everyone.
“Listening to the public, there were a lot of people probably questioning it,” says Eamon Kelly, the Loughmore manager. “I wasn’t surprised he was picked. From the very day he came back to us last year he was brilliant. He got very little game time with Tipperary, and he came back to us very hungry. He had a massive hunger to hurl and train.”
The divergence in his form for club and county started in 2020. Because of the pandemic, club championships were completed before the intercounty season resumed. Loughmore won the double and McGrath was imperious. Both county finals were one-point games and he got the winning score in both of them; man of the match in both of them.
Dunne was involved with Tipp that year as part of Liam Sheedy’s management team: “They played on 14 consecutive Sundays, something astronomical, and John played every minute of those games,” says Dunne. “There’s obviously a toll with that. I remember when he came back to Tipp, I didn’t feel the same energy off him.
“John is like a thoroughbred and with a thoroughbred it doesn’t take much to fall out of kilter. I don’t know what variables were in the mix. Injuries have to be a factor because he had serious injuries. But his form definitely suffered. From a Tipp perspective, he definitely wasn’t at the level we were used to seeing from John.”
At his peak, that level was extraordinary. In 2016, his rookie season as a starter, Tipperary won the All-Ireland with a glittering cast of forwards, some of whom were more prolific than he was. But when the analyst Brian McDonnell drilled into the numbers, McGrath’s overall data was staggering: he ranked second for puck-outs won on Tipp’s ball, third for pass completion, third for tackles made. His assists led to 3-9 and he was Tipp’s biggest goal threat: scored four, missed four, and created seven goal scoring chances for others.
None of Tipp’s other forwards made such a universal impact. In every respect it was a perfect design for the modern forward: “A DVD should be compiled of John McGrath’s attacking play,” wrote McDonnell, “and presented to every young forward in Tipperary.”
But in the span of McGrath’s career the game kept changing. For inside forwards, the premium on explosiveness increased. Most teams played with just two close to goal and sometimes only one; there were times last year when Tipp evacuated that area completely. None of that necessarily suited McGrath.
“What you’re looking at now is really pacey forwards breaking out to the side to get the ball. That’s not John’s forte. His forte are his hands and his brain and always being in the right place. Has he the five-yard burst? Maybe sometimes he has, maybe sometimes not.”
When his form dipped, the indignities mounted. In the 2020 championship he was replaced before half-time against Cork in the qualifiers and dropped for the All-Ireland quarter-final. A year later he was taken off at half-time against Clare and dropped for the Munster final. In 2023, he started just one of Tipp’s six championship games.
Through it all, though, he didn’t stop, and Tipp didn’t let him go. In the middle of the 2023 championship there was another portal into his class. In a chaotic draw against Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, he missed a free in the last minute to win the match.
A week later, against Limerick, he came on for his brother Noel in the fifth minute of stoppage time with Tipp needing a point to draw. He won a free a couple of paces inside the Limerick 65 and, in the spilling rain, he stood up to the shot and drove it between the posts. He had been on the field for just two minutes and 21 seconds. It was his first puck. The execution was cold, as if the previous week had never happened.
Like all great finishers, McGrath is a master of thrift. His possessions against Limerick didn’t reach double-figures, and as Maurice Brosnan pointed out, four of his first six possessions ended in turnovers. In the 2001 All-Ireland final Mark O’Leary scored 2-1 for Tipp from just seven possessions; in the 2010 final Lar Corbett scored 3-0 from seven possessions. McGrath’s performance last Sunday was in that rarefied space: 2-1 from half a dozen possessions, turning pennies into pounds.
“The beauty of John is that he doesn’t need an awful lot of ball to have a massive effect on a game,” says Shane McGrath, the former Tipp captain and RTÉ analyst. “John doesn’t have to touch the ball for ages to be absolutely on it when it comes to him. Very few lads are like that at intercounty level.”
In half an hour on the field last Sunday his brother Noel was dazzling in his creativity. Brian was part of the match day squad too and has been pushing silently in his brothers’ shadows for years. In the history of the GAA there have been very few families like them: the Fennellys in Kilkenny, the Spillanes in Kerry, the Dooleys in Offaly. Not many more.
“What I find funny about Noel, Brian and John is that they’re so vocal on the field with each other and with everyone else,” says Shane McGrath. “Off the field then, they mightn’t say two words. John is a very quiet fella. He wouldn’t knock you down with information. When the jersey goes on, they’re just different animals.”
When he was flying with Tipp, goals framed John’s identity as a player. At the start of his career, they came in downpours: in his first 14 championship matches he scored 10. In the Tipp forward line, he was a streak of lightning.
His goals last Sunday, though, were his first in the championship for two years; before that, the gap had been three years. Without goals, he couldn’t be the same as before.
“John is not predictable in terms of what he’s going to do,” says Dunne. “For the first goal [last Sunday] he had the ball set up for him to strike it off his right side and he probably sensed that was predictable. To come back in on his left at high speed and execute the shot he made, he made it look like nothing. He’s an exquisite player with the ball in his hand. I just thought it summed him up.
“Bryan O’Mara gave him the last pass for the second goal, but if you watch from behind the goals, how narrow he is until Bryan gets the ball, and then the width he makes in about two seconds to present an angle for the pass.
“I keep saying to players, make it easy for the player to make the pass. The pass goes to hand, he doesn’t break stride. If he has to adjust his stride or check his run, he ain’t scoring a goal from there. He’s just a natural born forward. Attacking is his sense.”
Tipp needed inspiration. They remembered a precious source.
