Back in his favourite berth on the half-back line, Tipperary's inspirational defender is looking forward to the Munster championship clash against Limerick, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

AT A certain point in the second half of the league semi-final against Cork, Pádraic Maher could hold his tongue no longer. His siting at full-back for the day in Paul Curran’s absence wasn’t meant as a muzzle but the law of unintended consequences had kicked in over the course of the afternoon and his voice had been lost in the move. Come the 56th minute, he decided enough was enough.

Collecting the sliotar behind his half-back line, he made a beeline right up the middle of the pitch with it on his stick. He hopped off a few Cork challenges before drawing a free near the opposition 45, dead straight in front of the posts.

Then he bounced to his feet and squared up to the first red jersey that caught his attention, jawing away as Eoin Kelly got ready to take the free that would put Tipp two points ahead. It wasn’t so much a solo run as a primal scream, a not-at-all subtle declaration of his frustration at being moored in front of his own posts for an hour.

On another day, it would have been the belt in the ribs Tipp needed to wake them up and get them to lengthen their stride all the way to the line. But Cork outscored them by 1-7 to 0-1 over the remaining 14 minutes, just sailed past them as if they were nothing to worry about. If Maher was frustrated before his jailbreak, the ease with which Cork put his side away left him slightly mystified.

He’d tried to rally the troops but had barely got them as far as the trenches. It rankled more than a regular league defeat would have.

“After a championship defeat, I’d be bad because you put so much into it,” he says. “But a league defeat like the one to Cork, you look at it and say, ‘We didn’t manage to move up a gear at all’. It was hard to take because it was a league semi-final against Cork so it was disappointing and frustrating as well. At half-time we were flat and we knew we just had to pick it up but we didn’t for whatever reason.

“It was just one of those days really. We were even saying at half-time that both teams were kind of dead and there was a chance there for both teams to drive on in the second half. Cork managed to do that and we didn’t. We were just scrapping away. I don’t know what was wrong with us. We were beaten that day and hopefully we will learn from it.”

He smiles and faithfully does the I’ll-play-anywhere-for-a-jersey routine when you ask him about getting annoyed at being rooted to the full-back line that day but he’s fooling nobody. Especially when he backs it up by saying: “the lads out the field in the same position would be very capable of doing the same thing as I would”.

Dutiful and all as this sounds, it’s patently not true. Maher has played three full seasons as a Tipp senior and has finished two of them with All Stars. The one time he didn’t, he was beaten to the wing-back spots by Tommy Walsh and JJ Delaney, who were winning their eighth and fifth awards respectively.

Whatever the future holds for the Tipp half-back line, the 23-year-old from Thurles Sarsfields ought to be its rattle and its hum for most of the next decade. He demurs, as a good team man should.

“All over the field – in the forwards and in the backs – none of us were up to scratch that day. This is the best time of year to have those types of performances. Everybody got a good shot at the league throughout the panel and everybody’s coming in at the same level to the championship. That’s what the league is there for too.”

The ending of the league brought with it the return of Lar Corbett a short time later of course. Although they share a club, there are eight years between them so it wasn’t as if he was in Corbett’s ear throughout his absence, offering special pleadings for a return. Paul Curran’s schoolkids wrote letters for the Tipp full back to deliver personally, begging the 2010 Hurler of the Year to pick up his stick again. Maher let him be.

“I’d have talked to him the odd time,” he says. “We’re in the same club and I might bump into him in the town or whatever. That would be it though. I wouldn’t be wrecking his head asking him to come back or anything. He’d have enough people doing that.

“But it’s great to have Larry back. For a while there it wasn’t looking great, he wasn’t going to come back. It was down him and it was his own decision. But everyone from the manager down is delighted to have him back.”

It’s tempting to imagine that a goodly portion of their delight is down to the fact they won’t be asked about it anymore. Maher bristles a little at the idea that Tipp had a particularly calamitous league, pointing out that the 2010 and 2011 campaigns didn’t exactly sparkle either. But Corbett’s self-imposed exile always made this one look worse, a dark, unwelcome shadow on any x-ray they held up to the light.

“That was the public more than anything,” he counters. “We can’t be thinking like that. We’ve 30-32 players in the squad with guys coming in as well. I know people were saying that Tipperary weren’t scoring goals in the league and that was down to Larry not being there but I don’t think it was. We weren’t creating chances at times, that was the problem. It’s hard to get goals if you don’t make the chances. So it’s just great to have him back – he’s one of the top hurlers in the country. We’ll take him back anyway.”

Any sight of Corbett’s yellow helmet against Limerick tomorrow will surely be an indication of panic on the Tipp sideline, although Declan Ryan said last week he didn’t think there was any chance he’d be ready.

One way or the other, Maher will be looking to hurl up a tempest in the half-back line. He hasn’t had the pleasure of meeting Limerick in Munster so far in his career (though the teams did meet in the 2009 All-Ireland semi-final) and the notion of it stirs him now.

“Never played in an easy Munster championship game yet,” he says with a smile. Curran’s return will move him back out to where he can affect the game most tomorrow, in amongst the noise and bustle of the middle third.

Unchained and unfettered, we can take it he won’t be as long clearing his throat this time.