Tipp can bring the medals but less Croke Park knowhow
The three wise men were flummoxed and when Tipperary was revealed as the answer there was an understandably salty response from host Anthony Daly. Tipperary haven't lost in The Big House since 2017 but their winning run extends to just three games, one more than next best, 2024 All-Ireland champions Clare, and the last of Tipp's victories came in '19.
Of the four teams playing this weekend, Tipperary have by far the most All-Ireland senior medal winners and medals in their panel, eight and 15 respectively. After the retirement of Cillian Buckley, Conor Fogarty and Walter Walsh last year, Kilkenny have three champions (Eoin Murphy, Richie and TJ Reid) and between them 12 Celtic Crosses.
Tipperary might have more medals, but they have been waiting to get back to Croke Park more years than any other Liam MacCarthy Cup team. On the flipside, since losing to them in the 2019 All-Ireland final, Kilkenny have played there in the SHC 15 times.
'It's an interesting one,' says Tipperary selector Declan Laffan of the factors in and out of his team's favour. 'Obviously, we're in Munster so Kilkenny are used to being in Croke Park, they're in it a couple of times every year.
Read More
Derek Lyng has lived the Tipp rivalry up close and personal
'Obviously we have some elder statesmen and they're not actually that old with the exception maybe of one or two, Ronan and John McGrath are only 29 and 30, I know it feels like they're around a long time. They have lots of mileage up, but they're still in the peak of their powers to be fair to them.
"Hopefully it'll be a help to us and some bit of an advantage when the time comes in some of them big games.'
Fifteen of Tipperary's All-Ireland quarter-final panel are set to get their first playing experience of Croke Park on Sunday. Having Noel McGrath in his 17th season to put the metaphorical arm around these rookies, as he did literally around Darragh McCarthy after his sending off against Cork in April, is huge, says McGrath's Loughmore-Castleiney club-mate Laffan.
'Since a lot of the underage All-Irelands have gone out to Croke Park, it's taken away the opportunity for a lot of lads to get in there. Without a doubt, the likes of Noel [McGrath] and Ronan and those lads, they're great leaders in the dressing room and I'm sure whatever bit of advice they can give out to the group, it will be hugely beneficial.'
There are extremities of age in the Kilkenny camp – Eoghan Lyng was two when TJ Reid made his Kilkenny senior debut in 2007– and the same goes for Tipperary: recent U20 All-Ireland winners McCarthy, Paddy McCormack, Oisín O'Donoghue, Sam O'Farrell were around five as Noel McGrath claimed his first of three All-Ireland medals in '10.
Tipperary seem to be defying the claim made by John Kiely three years ago that the gulf between U20 and senior had become wide. 'Obviously, Darragh is small in stature but he's a solid unit,' Laffan points out. 'He's all there and the other three boys are fine. A lot of them guys still have a certain amount of their gym work done. They've been at it since they've been in development squads all the way up along.
'It's not like they were discovered overnight and it was, 'Look, you have to go and pump iron six days a week.' They've been doing it a certain amount. I think players are more tuned in to what's required and I suppose particularly this bunch of them, they've been winning all the way along.'
Then there is Clonoulty-Rossmore's Robert Doyle, the county's U20 full-back two years ago who has had a breakthrough season after agreeing to come into the panel. 'Robert is his own man and I think he's been a revelation in fairness to him,' enthuses Laffan. 'I'm not going to say he didn't need a bit of coaxing… I think he just wasn't sure of himself maybe more so and had other things that he wanted to do first.'
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Irish Times
15 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Kilkenny v Tipperary 2009-19: The greatest decade in the bitterest rivalry in hurling
In Nowlan Park, on a scorching summer evening in 2013, all of the hard feelings between Kilkenny and Tipperary were distilled to the pure drop. A slump in form had landed them both in the qualifiers and, as it turned out, the All-Ireland would be decided without them. On that evening, though, there were no other worlds to conquer. Brian Hogan still remembers sitting in the Kilkenny dressingroom before the match, grilling slowly, like ribs on a barbecue. 'You can always hear a bit of noise when someone opens the door but sitting in your seat in the dressingroom there was a kind of energy emanating from the stands. It was probably the most surreal experience of my life. Word came in that the place was full for two hours before the match. 'This was shit or bust. It was just unthinkable to lose a championship match in Nowlan Park to Tipperary.' And that was the thing: it was only about each other. It was the deep-down essence of a Test match. In every rivalry, history keeps rolling and the mood changes colour, but nothing matters more than the latest score. READ MORE 'It was only the first round of the qualifiers, so the winner gets nothing,' says Richie Hogan. 'But it was all about not losing. It was so heavily weighed on not losing rather than winning. The consequences of losing to Tipperary were gigantic.' Brian Gavin had been pencilled in to referee the Leinster final a day later, but when the qualifier draw had paired two fighting cocks, he was rerouted to Nowlan Park. Gavin had refereed the 2011 All-Ireland final between them and would be the man in the middle for two other finals in 2014 and 2016; those games, though, were nothing like this. Kilkenny's Paul Murphy with Tipperary's Patrick Maher during the 2013 game at Nowlan Park. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho 'Refereeing Kilkenny-Tipperary championship in those years was like walking on a cliff edge,' Gavin said years later. 'There was the exhilaration of being so close to danger and the joy of the view, but you knew it was a match that could end you as a referee.' There was belting from the throw-in and after about 10 minutes Gavin could hear a rumble from the belly of the volcano. 'Something started with Eoin Larkin,' Gavin says now, 'so I went in and actually pushed him back. I shouldn't have done it, but I was just letting them know that I didn't want anything to start. Because of the atmosphere that night, something could have just ignited.' Kilkenny won a low-scoring game that was strangled with tension. 'If that Tipperary team were any good,' wrote Jackie Tyrrell in his autobiography, 'they would have beaten us in 2013. We were on the floor at the time.' Whatever Tyrrell said, losing was the ultimate insult. That match came dead in the middle of the greatest decade in hurling's bitterest rivalry. Between 2009 and 2019, Kilkenny and Tipperary met in nine championship matches, seven of which were All-Ireland finals, including a replay. For a salad on the side, there were four league finals too. Like in a game of skins, the stakes kept rising. Nothing was ever resolved. Neither of them scooped the pot. A settlement on the steps of the court was out of question. Neither party was innocent. Tipperary's Lar Corbett in action during the 2013 qualifier at Nowlan Park. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho The dynamics of the relationship were bound up with machismo and the over-arching past. Before 2009, Tipp and Kilkenny had only met four times in the championship in the previous half a century, but the long history between them was deposited in the soil, like minerals. There was an 80-year period in which Kilkenny only beat Tipperary once in the championship and Kilkenny's suffering was compounded by character assassination. 'Kilkenny for the hurlers, Tipp for the men,' ran the taunt. Though the phrase had fallen out of general circulation it hadn't been erased from Kilkenny's race memory. 'I was only made aware of that in Jackie Tyrrell's book,' says Paul Curran, the former Tipp captain, who spent 13 years on the panel. 'He references it a lot. That was obviously spoken about more in Kilkenny than we were aware of. That's probably where the dislike of Tipperary was bred into them.' Until Tipp and Kilkenny started meeting in Croke Park again, a lot of that stuff had lain dormant. The hostility, though, was an inheritance. 'You're talking to some of the older generation,' says Brian Hogan, 'and you're hearing stories about the 50s and 60s and Kilkenny getting butchered by Tipperary and Tommy Walsh losing the eye [in the 1967 League final] – it all came back to the surface.' 'That just became a lightning rod for us in that period,' says Richie Hogan. 'We weren't just going to beat Tipperary on the pitch, we were going to beat them in the battle as well. We might lose a couple of matches along the way, but it was unforgivable to be beaten in terms of the fight. That was definitely the attitude in our dressingroom.' In that decade, some of the matches were extraordinary. The All-Ireland finals of 2009 and 2010 and the drawn match in 2014 were among the greatest in living memory. 'If you were taking your last breath,' said Brendan Cummins, 'you would want to remember how you felt down on that field in those matches [the finals of '09 and '10]. You will never feel more alive than you were out there.' Tipperary's Brendan Cummins celebrates after the final whistle in the 2010 All-Ireland final. Photograph: Lorraine O'Sullivan/Inpho In the 2009 final both teams scored more than 20 times for the first time in the history of All-Ireland finals; in the drawn 2014 final there were 20 different scorers from play and more scores than in any 70-minute final, ever. They drove each other to it. 'For the 2010 final we were so tuned in that I didn't even know it was raining until the game was over,' says Curran. 'I didn't know Larry [Corbett] had scored three goals. The year before, I switched off, and I think we all switched off, for 30 seconds and it cost us. I promised that wasn't going to happen again.' In those years, the pendulum of imperatives kept swinging. One crowd or the other would draw a line in the sand, oblivious to the next tide. The laser focus that framed Tipp's performance in 2010 was reciprocated by Kilkenny a year later. The clinical fear of losing was exchanged, over and back. 'Of all the times we met in the championship [in that period] that's the only time we were underdogs,' says Richie Hogan. 'Everything about that game was different [for us]. We did a huge amount of video analysis. We wanted to cover everything off. That was brought about by the fear of losing.' Tipperary players from that era often refer to the 2009 league final in Thurles, which Kilkenny won after extra-time. For Tipp, though, it was a watershed. Only a few weeks earlier Kilkenny had beaten Tipp by 20 points in Nowlan Park, the kind of punishment beating that Cody's teams often administered to prospective challengers, as a twisted compliment. 'I remember going in at half-time,' said Curran years later, 'and their supporters were basically frothing at the mouth. It was a case of 'lock the gates'.' Kilkenny's Eddie Brennan and Tipperary's Conor O'Brien during the Division 1 league final in 2009. Photograph: Lorraine O'Sullivan/Inpho For the league final, though, Tipperary made a stand that would sustain their attitude for the next 10 years. 'Jesus, the hits,' says Curran. 'Séamie Callanan thundered into Brian Hogan and did his collar bone. Eddie Brennan caught me and if I had stayed down, he probably would have got sent off. But you didn't stay down, you just got up. You didn't want to show any bit of weakness.' And yet Kilkenny never stopped probing for weaknesses, convinced they would find some. Every game was like an interrogation by the secret police. 'We believed we could intimidate some of their forwards,' wrote Tyrrell in his autobiography. 'They had flaky lads over the years. '[In the 2012 All-Ireland semi-final] once we got a run on Tipp we mowed them down. It was the same old Tipp again – shaping and hiding behind their bullshit. They hadn't the balls to come out and take us on man for man.' Of all the games in that decade, the 2012 semi-final was the only crock. Tipp imploded and Kilkenny won by 18 points. 'We probably got our preparation wrong for that game,' says Eoin Kelly, the former Tipperary captain. 'We went on a training camp to Bere Island on a Friday and Saturday two or three weeks out from the game and then played important club matches on the Sunday. A lot of injuries came from that. It's not an excuse, but we had a lot of lads bandaged up that day. When the thing went wrong, it went absolutely wrong. The competitiveness to stay going just wasn't there, physically or mentally.' That was the day when Corbett insisted on marking Tommy Walsh and Tyrrell insisted on marking Corbett, while Pa Bourke struggled to make his insistence count for anything in the farcical merry-go-round. Tipperary's Brendan Maher and Kilkenny's Richie Hogan contest a high ball during the 2009 All-Ireland final. Photograph: Billy Stickland/Inpho It was also the day when Michael Rice was injured by a wild pull from Pádraic Maher under the Hogan Stand. Through all those years, and all the flaking, there were very few false strokes or massive flare-ups. Gavin remembers a league game where a player from each side wrestled on the ground 'punching each other on the helmet', but that kind of madness was scarce enough. In the six All-Ireland finals they contested in that decade, two players were sent off: Benny Dunne in 2009 for a reckless swing under a dropping ball, and Richie Hogan 10 years later for the kind of challenge that caused Chris Crummey to miss this weekend's semi-final. 'During my time, and I often said it, we wanted Tipperary to be the best form of Tipperary,' says Richie Hogan. 'We wanted to test ourselves against the best. If it ever came up in a prematch meeting, 'They're going to bring it to us physically,' straight away somebody would say, 'We hope they do. Don't just expect it, hope for it. Let's hope that this is as hard as possible because that makes it worth it.' 'Brian Cody and Martin Fogarty and Michael Dempsey, they were trying to get us to think about the history of Tipperary and Kilkenny, probably thinking that it might arouse something different in us. But we were a team that wanted to make our own history. We didn't care about what happened in the 50s and 60s and Hell's Kitchen and all that. None of that stuff registered with us. It was just that it wasn't going to happen to us. 'We always felt, 'Do you know what? That's their problem.' We make our own history, and this is the way it's going to go.' The pain and the glory flowed back and forth. Kilkenny beat Tipp to win four All-Irelands in a row, and Tipp spiked their attempt at five. In the All-Ireland finals of 2016 and 2019, Tipperary inflicted two of the heaviest losses of Cody's reign. He grew up with the 50s and 60s stuff. Those defeats would have cut him to the bone. This weekend, two new teams will pick up the thread. All they need to know is what their gut tells them. Losing will be poison.
Irish Times
15 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Evolving Tipperary can upset experienced Kilkenny
All-Ireland SHC semi-final: Kilkenny v Tipperary, Croke Park, Sunday, 4pm – Live on RTÉ 2 One of the GAA 's principal rivalries – if not its most bitter – has been reimagined for the 2020s. The counties have not met in championship since 2019 having been all but perennial antagonists for the previous decade, so the friction levels are turned down a bit. Not that you would have known it in the Nowlan Park league encounter in March when four red cards were brandished in the space of a few minutes. On that occasion, Tipp were easy winners, as befitted a team with a two-man advantage. This weekend it comes down to a choice between the experience of Kilkenny and the youthful reinvigoration of their opponents. The Leinster champions are fresh from their sixth straight title after a low-stress provincial canter but this has been the way the county has generally presented in recent years – their place in the final rarely threatened and, apart from the last-gasp win over Galway two years ago, the actual deciders not especially taxing either. READ MORE It has still been enough for more than competitive displays in All-Ireland semi-finals, two wins over Clare and last year's failure to finish off the same opponents. In 2022, Brian Cody's last year as manager, he gave an insight into how Kilkenny had approached the semi-final with Clare. Kilkenny's Martin Keoghan and Mikey Butler. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho 'Up to the Leinster final we were playing more or less every week, which gives limited time – no time, really – for training.' It is easy to see why Limerick prized the direct access to the last four and the month free of distractions for training and coaching purposes. Derek Lyng's preparations have shown few signs of deviation from this approach. In what is his third year, he is able to bring a full-bore selection to this weekend. There are some rumblings of disquiet over Martin Keoghan's hamstring but he is named to start. He would be a stark loss, as even if he hasn't quite maintained his spectacular league form, his uninhibited ability to take on defenders is a major item in the team's weaponry. Eoin Cody is back in the team as well after a long absence but presumably he has got back up to speed in recent weeks. Kilkenny retain just two players form the last team to win an All-Ireland, Eoin Murphy and the eternal TJ Reid. The latter's dead ball striking remains a primary source for the Leinster champions but in play he is also still a handful even if his trademark ball-winning ability is less of a threat to Tipperary's defence than the speed of an attack such as Cork's. TJ Reid scoring for Kilkenny, which is what he tends to do. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho Lyng has named the same forwards as started against Clare last year, a testament to their consistency but also evidence of a standing concern in the county – that panellists aren't exerting enough pressure on first-team players. His counterpart, Liam Cahill, is in the happy position of having hit his obvious targets for the year, progress in both league and championship while incorporating younger talent from the under-21/20 generation that he himself cultivated. The backs have stalwart pillars in Ronan Maher and Michael Breen and for all their new generation dynamic, half of the 2019 All-Ireland winners are still involved either starting or on the bench. Jake Morris and Andrew Ormond have been exceptional up front, with experienced backup in the reborn John McGrath and Jason Forde. If centrefield looks less settled, it's not Kilkenny's strongest sector either. The lack of reference points makes this a hard call. There is every reason to trust Kilkenny's remarkably consistent delivery at this level more than the Tipperary rebuild and to be wary of one of those blazing phases when they go to town on a team. But Tipp have had the lessons of two incinerations in Pairc Uí Chaoimh when they chased a lost cause regardless. In the league final they actually outscored Cork in the second half, and with 14 men in Munster they still managed to create goal chances. Kilkenny won't present them with the tracts of space they got from Galway but in a coin-toss decision, maybe their hard-won momentum can carry them a little farther. Verdict: Tipperary
Irish Times
15 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Tyrone deserving favourites to extend underage dominance
All-Ireland MFC Final: Kerry v Tyrone, St Conleth's Park, Newbridge, Sunday, 1.30pm – Live TG4 The power of Tyrone's underage conveyor belt continues to impress. This year, they won a third under-20 All-Ireland in four seasons to go with Omagh CBS's two Hogan Cups in the past three years. Now, the minors are in the Electric Minor Ireland All-Ireland, looking for a first win in 15 years. Kerry are the first non-Ulster side to make the final in three years and are after a first title since the five-in-a-row sequence concluded seven years ago. They won a classic semi-final against Mayo, surviving a late comeback with a huge contribution from Ben Kelliher of 0-9, seven from play. Like Kerry, Tyrone are unbeaten so far, but have a personnel problem with the gifted Joel Kerr having signed for English soccer club West Ham, effective from July 1st. Frantic negotiations have been ongoing against a pessimistic backdrop. The Ulster champions have, however, had prolific inputs from Peter Colton and Eoin Long and have enjoyed the benefits of training with the under-20s and seniors in Garvaghy. READ MORE They deserve to be favourites even on a form line through Cavan who they beat more comfortably in the provincial final than Kerry managed later in the All-Ireland series. Verdict: Tyrone
