KEITH DUGGANtalks to veteran number one Brendan Cummins who is looking forward to yet another championship campaign with Tipperary

THE WORLD will always feel half right and recognisable to Tipperary hurling supporters as long as Brendan Cummins is between the sticks. Not only does he provide a tangible link to the Premier side that won the county’s last All-Ireland title in 2001, he might well be the most calming presence in all of sport.

At the appointed hour, he walked into a hotel function room to discuss Tipperary’s plans and ambitions for the upcoming season, popping a courtesy mint and throwing his eyes to heaven at the inevitable wisecracks about the current perils of his day-job – he works in banking.

Aged 34 now, he has changed little since he first nailed down a starting place with Tipperary and as he eased himself into a leather seat surrounded by press men – “This is like Mastermind, lads” – the thought suddenly struck that Cummins looks as unruffled on the field of play as he does sitting here in dapper pinstripe suit.

There is something unflappable about the man. Last autumn, Cummins won his fourth All Star award. Even allowing for the subjectivity of the scheme and the inevitable criticism that it draws, few would suggest that the level of brilliant consistency the Ballybacon man has demonstrated over the last decade merited fewer awards.

And he would probably have been handed more but for the fact that he has performed in a decade blessed with a celebrated parade of gifted goalkeepers. He came through a turbulent summer two years ago when he was controversially dropped by then manager Babs Keating after a championship draw against Limerick and responded with a vintage display last year.

But even the league offered tidy evidence of the essential foolhardiness of trying to “keep” goal in a sport like hurling, where the odds of stopping a small ball delivered with murderous power and pin-point accuracy are hopelessly stacked against the net minder.

Cummins was in goal on the signature day at Nowlan Park when Kilkenny stung Tipperary for five goals before half-time. He didn’t panic then, nor was he put out when he was named in the substitutes while Darren Gleeson put in a fine afternoon against Galway. There are no airs and graces with Cummins: he just gets on with business.

“Just looking forward,” he confirms. “All I ever wanted to do was look forward. As far as I’m concerned everything pre-2009 hasn’t happened, never mind 2007. I just look at Cork on Sunday week and the last game I looked at was Kilkenny, the one before that was Limerick, the one before that I was a sub to Darren Gleeson in the league game against Galway. To be the best I could be on that day. That’s the way I’ve lived my life and that’s the way I’m going to continue doing it.

“They (Kilkenny) just got the complete run on us. I think on the day, rather than taking a step forward, which is your natural instinct, when Kilkenny got the second goal we took a step back and like any people on top of their game, if you take a step back they’re going to go to town and that’s what happened that day. We didn’t really take the challenge to Kilkenny. We kind of went back into our shell and if you’ve got the likes of Eoin Larkin and these boys, Eddie Brennan and Aidan Fogarty floating around the place, if they get a chance to score a goal they’re going to take it.

“We gave them five chances, they took their five goals. Maybe with another team if you gave them five chances they might take three but Kilkenny have such a ruthless crew at the moment that if you give them five chances they’re going to take five and that’s really what happened on the day.”

Any conversation about contemporary championship hurling will feature Kilkenny as a chief frame of reference. In the past three years, when the Cats have really begun to put air miles between themselves and the chasing pack, Tipperary have been the team that has most honestly manned up the challenge.

While other counties have been distracted by internal turmoil, Tipperary, under Liam Sheedy, have not disguised their ambition to win the MacCarthy Cup despite the intimidating obstacle that Kilkenny present. At the heart of Sheedy’s policy has been the promotion of the younger players who had achieved success at minor grade.

The sudden influx of fresh-faced kids has made Cummins aware of his own longevity in the sport but he has enjoyed the change. He has occasionally done the old arm-around-the-shoulder act but more often that not, he finds himself stunned at the single-mindedness they have brought to the dressingroom.

“It’s more kind of feeding off their energy to be honest with you! With these fellas there’s no need to tell them stop drinking or stop going out late at night. They just don’t do it. It doesn’t even come into their head. Around the dressingroom there’s no talk about, ‘where were you last Saturday night’.

“It’s amazing. These fellas, I don’t know what they do at night like! Genuinely they’re well-grounded fellas and they’ve gotten success and it hasn’t gone to their head. It’s fantastic to see it. I suppose you’d have a word with them here and there about the games that are going on, especially before bigger games, in the build-up to games.

“They certainly don’t need to be told how to prepare for matches. Maybe on match day I suppose I can have a word here and there, that’s what I try to do. I don’t need to be rushing to them, that’s one thing for sure.

“Anyway, it is not as if the fact of clocking up a decade of championship experience makes this game any easier.”

In Last Man Standing, Christy O'Connor's fine tribute to the extreme edge on which all hurling goalkeepers thrive, Cummins offered a true glimpse into how his mind works during the maelstrom of games. Talking about a freakishly instinctive double save he made against Paul O'Brien and Paul Flynn of Waterford in the 2004 championship, he immediately began to talk himself out of the adrenaline rush, determined above all not to make the elementary mistake that can ruin any goalkeeper's good work in an instant.

“That’s what keeps the edge on me. I don’t want to make the mistake they’ll remember me for. If I drop a ball, that save goes out the window.”

It may have been as close as anyone can come to explaining the feeling of being the man charged with the unreasonable task of preventing the ball from crossing that magical line. In sport, the knowledge that time is limited is the trade-off for experience gained. That is something which Cummins is extremely aware of.

“The pressure is. . . I don’t know, the older you get do you start to wonder how many more times do I have at getting a go at this and that might add pressure to yourself that, if you make a mess of this, you mightn’t have four or five more years to make up for it.

“The pressure is intense; the pressure certainly is why I play the game anyway. The pressure hasn’t waned as I’ve gotten older, you could say that it’s gotten a little bit stronger and that’s what it’s all about.”

His senior career dates back to a time that seems more distant than its actual years now. It was Babs who gave him his first senior run, in a league match in 1993 when the dressingroom was still peopled with Tipperary’s Light Brigade from the ’89 and ’91 All-Ireland years, players like Nicky English and Pat Fox – “Fellas that would be looking down at you from the walls of pubs”, as Cummins reminisced a decade later in an interview with this paper.

He made his championship debut two years later and although the second half of the 1990s were defined by successive years of glorious and unpredictable championship hurling, they were chastening for Tipperary. The worst for Cummins may well have been the four-goal rush that Limerick hit them for in 1996 – it was not until the marauding Kilkenny/Tipperary league final of 2003 that he conceded as many goals (five flew past that day) – and the awards were accumulated slowly: an under-21 All-Ireland in 1995, a National League title in 1999 and then, with English back in the dressingroom as boss, a long-awaited All-Ireland in 2001.

By then, Cummins and Tommy Dunne were the only players to have come through the under-14 development squad that had been his introduction to county hurling.

Ballybacon was football territory and the importance of making that squad lay in the fact that it brought him into the slipstream: he was on the books of young players to watch. Perhaps that is why he marvels at the confidence and seriousness of his younger team-mates today.

Even though he has over 50 championship days racked up, there are always first times. He has yet to beat a Cork team in Thurles – his first time experiencing a summer win over Cork was last year. And he has yet to play on a Tipperary team that bests Kilkenny in the championship.

These things play on the back of his mind and it is only natural to wonder if and when the break is going to come – concerns which kind his younger team-mates are blissfully free of.

“Jesus, they’re fantastic,” he enthuses. “They have no fear whatsoever. I’d hope when I came in first I was the same kind of way but these fellas have won all the way along the line and if you’re used to winning at whatever level it’s at, we saw it last year with ourselves. We got on a roll winning the league and we started doing things we thought we were incapable of. They have injected the freshness into the squad that we needed. You see Padraig Maher, Patrick Maher and these fellas, they have no real fear, they go out and play.

“There are no restrictions on what they’re doing. I said at the start they have probably seen more game time than Liam might have thought because you can see how quickly they’re developing. Noel McGrath came in, he’s not 19 until December. Noel McGrath will hurl way better as a senior hurler than he will his own age group because he just rises to that challenge of better players around him and he just looks as if he’s playing all his life with Tipperary.

“And it’s not to burden him with too much pressure, we have to mind him as much as we can. It’s not Noel McGrath’s responsibility to go out and win All-Ireland medals for Tipp, it’s certainly just to help us and he’s given the rest of us the extra push that we’ve needed to say something could happen here, we just have to keep our heads about ourselves.”

Cork, yet again, on Sunday: it is the eternal duel. It would, of course, have been easier if Tipperary had been playing the shadow team that represented Cork but it wouldn’t have been the same. For all the poisonous aftertaste left by the winter dispute in Cork, there is a feeling that the Rebel team are primed for one of their spectacular against-the-odds performances.

“Waiting in the long grass,” as Cummins puts it. Deep down, he will probably find the familiar presence of Donal Óg Cusack warming up at the other end comforting. The Cloyne great may be an opposition goalkeeper but he shares with Cummins the restlessness and devotion to his craft that makes them both irreplaceable figures in their respective teams. But that is for another day.

Right now, Brendan Cummins is only looking forward and he speaks with such optimism and freshness you would swear he is only starting out.

“I think if we hit it right there’s no doubt we can be a serious team but you’re right, consistency is going to be the key for us and that’s what we’re searching for,” he says leaning back into the leather chair and relaxing.

“That’s part of Liam’s role – and mine as a senior player, to put a bit of calm across the waters when they get ruffled if the pressure comes on or if panic comes around the place . . .”