Tipperary’s midfielder knows they must pick up the pieces again following a disastrous league campaign and the departure of former manager John Evans
WHEN A few of the Tipperary senior footballers went down to watch the minors play their Munster semi-final against Cork last week, they and the other Tipp supporters in the crowd came away from Páirc Uí Chaoimh with the oddest feeling.
The minors beat Cork 1-10 to 0-9 but you wouldn’t have claimed that there was joy unconfined on the road home. The performance was patchy, so much so that there was even the faintest whiff of grumble and crib in the air afterwards.
“They didn’t play well,” says midfielder George Hannigan.
“But to go down to Cork and beat them and not play well just shows how far our expectations have come with regard to underage. It’s high time that we stepped up to the plate and try to do what they’re doing.”
It’s a long road from said to done, of course. Longer still when a senior championship summer routinely begins with an afternoon in Kerry’s company.
Although the minors routinely take on their Kerry counterparts as equals and betters these days, the time when Tipp could be relied upon to keep it close and interesting against Jack O’Connor’s side has melted away for now.
John Evans’ decision to walk away after the league suggests they will be seen as cannon fodder for the Kingdom on Sunday.
“We’re nearly used to it now at this stage,” says former St Vincent’s midfielder Hugh Coghlan. “It’s three years in a row that we’ve got Kerry.
“We’re after having a horrendous league campaign – back down to the dumps of Division Four. It’s tough but we’re trying to turn it around and get going for the game.
“We’re just used to it – they’re the cards we’re dealt with and just go and deal with it as best we can and learn from the last two years. I was thinking recently that we were considered to have done well in the last two years against Kerry, in Thurles and Killarney. We played well for the first half but the final score was a drubbing. We were beaten by 12 points on both occasions.”
Worse nearly than the annual shellacking is the fact that it comes so early in the summer. The toughest part of new manager Peter Creedon’s job will come after Sunday, when he has to find a way to maintain the squad’s interest in the championship even though it will be five weeks until they have a match and four weeks until they know their opponents.
“Lads start drifting away in different directions,” says Hannigan. “That’s the big issue with such a long lay-off. It can be hard to get up for a match that’s a month away.”
In addition to their league woes, they lost marque forward Barry Grogan to emigration over the spring, as well as midfielder Brian Jones. The need for a fresh influx of young, fearless talent has never been greater but ferrying the colts from David Power’s nursery to the great plains of senior football will be a delicate operation over the coming years.
Michael Quinlivan and Shane Scully from last year’s All Ireland-winning side will start on Sunday and in time there will be more. But, as Coghlan points out, nobody is pretending that these are sure things.
“There have been other counties that have had underage success and it has never transferred to senior level. It’s not a natural progression. Some Cork reporter was saying after the minor match that these Tipp minors are very good and five will make it onto the Tipp senior panel in years to come. That’s the whole key – how many are going to stay playing and committing?
“I played on a minor team that beat Kerry in the first round and there’s only around two on the whole panel now. An awful lot of boys fall away but the luxury of the top tier counties is that everybody rows in together and everybody’s driving for the panel.
“We just find it that bit difficult at the moment, getting a squad of 30 lads that are committed for an entire campaign, not just for a few months.” It’s a hard road. And the first mile is the hardest.
