It wasn't for publication so we won't attach a name to the jibe. Not that it matters, particularly. Let's just say he was a well-known hurling man who'd been involved with multiple All-Ireland winning teams. And those teams, it is fair to say, would likely have won the game we'd just seen lost by Tipperary. Or they'd have faced his tongue if they hadn't.

It was the Limerick game in Thurles this summer, Tipp a goal up in the 70th minute and two points dead by the end. As we got up from our seats to go and sift through the rubble, our man was snappy with his verdict. “Sure that’s the nutty professor for you . . .”

He was talking about Prof Eamon O'Shea MA, MSc, PhD. Even with abbreviations, the Tipperary manager has more letters attached to his name than he has in it. Author or co-author of 15 books, chapter contributor to 25 more, a regular article writer whose expertise has appeared in over 70 economic and medical journals dating back to 1987. A specialist in the economics of ageing, a driver of social policy and – surely most exciting of all – a one-time op-ed writer in The Irish Times.

And yes, in his way, maybe a little nutty. There’s a scene in Lar Corbett’s autobiography where he sidles up to Corbett at training one night and says nothing, just looks him up and down for a few seconds.

“What’s up?” asks Lar.

“Nothing,” replies O’Shea, “I just wanted to see if you were right.”

And then he gives two thumbs up before walking away, leaving Corbett staring off into the distance wondering what just happened.

O’Shea is given, certainly, to the occasional left-field pronouncement. Like when, in the depths of a bad run in this year’s league during which goals flowed through his defence, he said that they had been doing a lot of work in training “getting the players to like the ball again”. It’s not difficult to imagine where that would have sat in the list of priorities in Tipp teams gone by.

Yet these are the kind of things you hear from and about O’Shea that you don’t really hear from or about any other hurling manager. At the press day ahead of tomorrow’s final, he ruminated at length over whether or not it was important or even possible to divorce the result of a game from his ability to enjoy it.

“Maybe if I was professional it would be more difficult for me. But the enjoyment of the game for me is paramount. I understand that as manager I’m expected to compete and win . . . .

Tremendous experience

“But I also understand that when you go to a game against Kilkenny, in an All-Ireland final or down in Nowlan Park for the qualifier last year, it’s a special hurling occasion. And you can enjoy that at some level at some stage afterwards. You don’t enjoy the result, you’re devastated. But you can say, ‘That was a tremendous experience,’ and say, ‘To be part of something like this, not personally but for the team and the tradition, is something extraordinary.’

“[That enjoyment] has to be fundamental. Why else would we try to be the best we can be? I know the result is terribly important, but to me the process of what happened in the past year has also been good. We’ve grown as a team, we’ve grown as a unit, our trust has grown.

“Where we’ve been to has been a good experience for everybody at the end of this. The result will determine how you’re remembered in a sense but I don’t care, really. I know what has happened here. I know I’ve worked with a really good group. That’s what matters to me.”

O’Shea as a player was known mainly for his pace. He scored 1-1 in the 1976 All-Ireland minor final as Tipp destroyed Kilkenny and followed up with an All-Ireland under-21 title three years later. Len Gaynor was over the all-conquering Kilruane McDonaghs team of the late 1970s and early 80s and remembers him as a player who marched to the beat of his own drummer.

“He was a different sort of hurler for that time,” says Gaynor. “He was a step ahead of what was around. He was very fast around a hurling field, he had a great burst of speed. You could see that he was a pure thinking forward.

“He was always trying to come with ways of beating his man and finding a position to shoot. He was a smashing wing forward. He was very intelligent of course and very highly educated. He spent a lot of his time in school and college and we didn’t need him or see that much of him around the place.”

Yet for all O’Shea’s abilities and early successes, his inter-county career was ultimately a frustration. He made his debut in 1979 and played for four seasons without winning a game in Munster before going to the University of Leicester for a year when he finished in UCD. It meant that he missed 1983, which meant that he missed Tipperary’s only championship win of that period.

No success

When he came home, he stayed in Dublin and transferred to play for them for a couple of seasons, again with no success. He returned to Tipp for the 1986 season and when they lost in the first round again to Clare, he retired.

He played seven seasons of intercounty hurling and never won a championship game. Then Tipp went and won Munster the following year. Little wonder he seeks a more metaphysical sort of pleasure from the game.

Benny Dunne was in the Tipp panel when O'Shea arrived alongside Liam Sheedy in 2008. Whereas the rest of the players had to Google him, Dunne had played under O'Shea in Galway.

“None of the boys knew him or had ever heard of him,” says Dunne. “The one thing I said to them was that they were going to be impressed with him but that he was different. It was going to be unorthodox and he was going to bring a different kind of a spin to coaching them. Lucky enough, I think we were ready for that sort of change at the time.

“He was big into the beauty of the game. Just at the start of training, when you would be in pairs striking the ball over and back, Eamon’s big thing would be to go around saying, ‘Feel the ball, feel the ball.’

“And what he meant was that we were to feel it off the sweet spot in the bas of the hurley, feel that strike. It’s the simplest, most basic thing in the game but for him it was where everything started. He wanted you to start your night’s work feeling that good, crisp, clean strike on the ball. And from there, everything else flowed.”

And space. Everything came back to space. O’Shea was blessed to arrive into a side that had Noel McGrath, John O’Brien, Corbett and Eoin Kelly primed and ready for a new way. Dunne was there too and as he predicted, the players tuned in to O’Shea’s frequency eventually.

“A lot of the time when a new coach comes in, he’s there showing off how methodical he is and how advanced his drills are and all that . . . Eamon wasn’t like that.

Certain zone

“His whole thing was that when you’re playing in a match, you can’t think within a certain zone on the pitch. You have to play what you see, you have to go where you think the game will break. Don’t be afraid to ghost out of your position, do something different, never feel that you are locked into one place. Play it how you see it, just don’t stand in one place the whole time because that’s what defenders are hoping you’ll do.”

And yet, for all the apparent airiness and fairness, Eamon O’Shea is a man who has devoted his life to the brass tacks of numbers. Hence his casual chiding of reporters ahead of Tipp’s league semi-final against Clare when he warned us to “be careful about making forecasts with very little data”.

Sure that’s the nutty professor for you? Possibly so. Yet here he stands, 70 minutes away from an All Ireland.

If that’s what nutty is, then who’d be sane?