Motivation not an issue for Maher and Tipperary as Cats come calling

The last thing you’ll hear out of either Tipperary or Kilkenny at the moment is that they’re going into Sunday’s league game in Thurles facing any threat of relegation from Division 1A, but that’s not saying it doesn’t form a relevant backdrop.

Both teams lost their opening game – Tipperary falling tamely to Cork, and Kilkenny losing out narrowly to Galway – which means a second successive defeat would leave them stuck at the bottom of the table, with only three more rounds to come. It’s something Tipperary defender Pádraic Maher admits is in their back of their minds, particularly given their own very disappointing start.

“Kilkenny on Sunday, so a nice little tasty one,” he says. “And we do badly need a win with Tipp. I suppose Kilkenny need a win too. You don’t want to be getting dragged in at the bottom of the table.”

Maher has been carrying a back injury, and so didn’t play with Munster in the Interprovincial – but won’t need any extra incentive to be on the field on Sunday. Kilkenny have now won the last five meetings between the teams, and Tipp’s last league win over them came in 2010, which proved a turning point for their entire year.

Turning point

“I suppose we’ve played so many time in the last few years it’s hard to keep track of it. 2010 was a bit of a turning point for us but we need to get a few wins under our belt no matter who they’re against.

“If you get them against Kilkenny or Galway they would make you feel more confident but at the moment we’re just looking for a few wins to get the thing on the road again.

“We want to win every game anyway, and especially against Kilkenny we like to get the wins in as well. If the performance comes, all well and good but we’re mad to get the wins as much as we can.”

Tipperary and Maher are playing down the possibility that Sunday’s game is also shaping up as some sort of revenge match for last year’s All-Ireland semi-final, where Tipperary fell apart in the second half.

“Well it’s a new set-up for us really, a new regime, so I don’t really think that comes into it. They made bits of us in August, we have no qualms about that. We just want to get the wins in because we want to be involved at the business end of the league.”

Meanwhile, Kerry are among the first counties to indicate their support for the proposals of the Football Review Committee (FRC), which will be the main feature of the clár at GAA Congress in Derry on March 22nd-23rd.

Monday’s monthly board meeting discussed all the 73 motions set to come before Congress, and Kerry delegates gave their near unanimous backing to motions dealing specifically with the FRC proposals.

Delegates voted against motion 21 (which leans more towards the clean pick up), and also that extending the duration of adult games to 70 minutes should not be extended to Junior or B football.