The fightback had to start somewhere. It’s just that nobody saw it starting there.
If you were in Nowlan Park that day, you weren’t thinking that the Tipperary minors were about to change the way the county thought about itself. They were level with Kilkenny in last year’s All-Ireland minor final but they were down to 13 men. Over the previous month, the Tipp seniors had limped out of Munster and the under-20s had faded out of the All-Ireland final. Why should this be any different?
And yet it was. James Woodlock’s young team wouldn’t be beaten. In front of a Kilkenny crowd, through a second half and two periods of extra time, they fought on their backs and somehow came away with a 2-17 to 3-12 victory. They couldn’t know it at the time but they brought more than a cup back to Tipp that day.
Liam Cahill was in the crowd, as he always is. Throughout his time as Tipp manager, he has made a point of making sure that the underage set-ups are connected to the seniors. Make them feel part of the whole, inspire them to want to reach elite standards. Except here, the whole thing was flipped around.
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“We came out of Nowlan Park last year on the back of such a huge performance,” Cahill said last week. “Young players of 16 and 17 years of age, showing us what we try to ingrain in our players from a coaching and management perspective.
“The minor win gave us a great sense of pride. But also a great sense of realisation as a senior squad and senior management team, that we need to be doing that. Where we’re at and the responsibility we have to the jersey – that has to come from the top down. We should be inspiring young fellas rather than they inspiring us.”
So let’s say it started there. Some of Cahill’s players were in the crowd that day too – Jake Morris and others have referenced it as well. Tipp hurling needed something to lift it up from rock bottom. The fact that it gets mentioned at all gives a stark sense of where things were at the time.
“Liam was a broken man last year with the pressure he was under,” Woodlock says. “Pressure was coming from Tipp supporters, like any county I suppose. We’re hungry for success and Liam, unfairly, felt all of that and put it on himself.
“What the minors did in Nowlan Park lifted the entire county. Liam was hurt by the way the seniors went out of the championship. For the minors then to give the Tipp public a team to follow, I think that gave him inspiration. He went back and he worked with his group over the winter.”
Deciding on who that group was going to consist of was the next step along the road. Sitting here now, on All-Ireland final weekend, it looks a no-brainer that Cahill would refresh the panel and flush it with youth. But there were flurries of resistance here and there when the 45-man training panel was announced in October.
Cathal Barrett’s omission raised some eyebrows, to say the least. Bonner Maher and Dan McCormack were finishing up but Barry Heffernan stepping away didn’t feel like a vote of confidence. And while the likes of Darragh McCarthy, Sam O’Farrell and Andrew Ormond were expected to have big futures, nobody had them playing in a senior All-Ireland final any time soon.
In all, the match day 26 this weekend contains just 18 of the squad named for Tipp’s last game in 2024. That’s a huge turnover for a top-tier county – Cork return to the final with 24 of the 26 that were named for this day last year. Cahill chose to rebuild the plane while flying the plane. And he didn’t care who knew it.
The next stage of the rebuild was that he had to sell it. If it was going to work, he was going to need to bring people with him. The gradual erosion of the connection between the Tipp team and its public was obvious to everyone, the manager most of all. He started dropping occasional mini-grenades into interviews, leaving phrases like “impatient, less knowledgeable Tipperary hurling folk” hanging in the air for everybody to muse over.
In February, he sat down for an interview with Shane Brophy, the sports editor of the Nenagh Guardian. In the wake of their dismal 2024 season, a clip had gone viral among Tipp supporters of Brophy asking Cahill if he had had any thoughts over whether he was the right man to take the team forward and Cahill getting in a snot about it, saying straight out that he took “umbrage” at the question.
It was the kind of testy exchange intercounty managers tend to have far more often with local journalists than with national ones. Family business, spilling out in public, both sides caring far more about the state of things than the rest of us rubbernecking from the outside. They sorted it out together later in the year when the dust had settled – at the Tipp press event last week, Cahill brought the incident up himself without anybody asking about it.
“You can’t get too sensitive over these things. You have to understand that these questions have to be asked too when the performances aren’t there. Referencing Shane’s question after the Clare game, it probably was warranted at the time but it’s a tougher question when it comes from one of your own.
“The reality of it is, the County Board had given me a three-year term to try and fix this thing the best I could. Yes, there was not much of a ship sticking out of the water, and it didn’t look like it was going to come back up any time soon. But I had huge belief in my ability to turn it around.”
He franked that belief in the February interview, which lasted the guts of two hours and ran to more than 6,000 words in the Nenagh Guardian. Nothing was off the table and the pair of them got deep in the weeds of everything to do with Tipperary hurling. It’s by a distance the most extensive interview given by any intercounty manager in football or hurling all year.
Bonus: will Tipperary or Cork triumph in this weekend's All Ireland hurling final?
The All-Ireland senior men's hurling final takes place on Sunday.To mark the occasion, The Irish Times sports department takes over our podcast feed to bring you a conversation between sports writer Malachy Clerkin and columnists (and legends of the game) Nicky English and Joe Canning.They look at the teams and tactics they expect to see on Sunday, and make some big predictions. Whether you are a die-hard fan, or simply want to jump on the hurling bandwagon before kick-off, we hope you enjoy this conversation.
At this remove, maybe the most interesting thing about it is that it was Cahill’s idea. It was he who rang Brophy to suggest it, rather than the other way around, as would be the norm. He did an extended radio sit-down with Tipp FM around the same time. Somewhere along the way, he had clearly decided that it was a good time to make a full-court press and get the word out among the Tipp public.
None of which would have mattered a damn without results. Of all the things that had to change, nothing was more crucial. Tipp had won three of their first four league games when the interview appeared. They followed it up by going to Nowlan Park and beating Kilkenny, topping the table and making the league final. That it ended in a shelling from Cork was easily waved away.
There were a couple of reasons for that. One, Cork were understandably further down the road and, in the right mood, were liable to give anyone a hammering. Two, and more importantly, the campaign as a whole had provided Tipperary people with a team to get behind, one filled with new, young players who didn’t look out of place.
“They got their opportunity and they took it,” says Woodlock, who had all of them through his minor teams. “They’re old beyond their years and they’ve had formative experiences that a lot of other players didn’t have. They won a Munster minor final in 2022 on penalties. They went to an All-Ireland final that year against an Offaly team that were on a roll and beat them by a point in front of 27,000 people.
“But the other thing that stood to them and stood to Liam is that we were in a position to try them. Given where Tipperary were, you could take a chance on them. Limerick wouldn’t have done it, for example. They wouldn’t have had to do it. We were rebuilding and these lads were there, they’d had a good grounding, proper values right the way up through the system. And we’ve more coming, too.”
If it was just a load of young colts, it wouldn’t be enough. The final piece of the rebuild was to empower and embolden the senior players that were already there. Ronan Maher was always going to be the foundation stone of the defence, with Mikey Breen, Bryan O’Mara and Eoghan Connolly given their head around him. Once Willie Connors got into the team, he proved incredibly hard to shift out of it, which hasn’t always been the case during his Tipp career. Jake Morris has spent the summer looking like the middle child all grown up.
But the true late summer harvest has been reaped up front, where Jason Forde (debut 2013) and John McGrath (2015) have been revived. Cahill didn’t overwork them in the spring – Forde sat out a couple of games altogether and McGrath didn’t start one until the Kilkenny game in March. Come the championship, they have been reborn. For all their longevity, they have one All Star between them – McGrath in 2016. You’d imagine that will change this year.
The job isn’t done yet. Cahill has a slightly rueful smile at the press day when it was put to him that Tipp were in bonus territory here, that a semi-final would have been enough on its own, given where they were last year. He’s been telling people all along that success is a process – and not a quick process at that. All it took was getting to an All-Ireland final for them to listen.
“There’s a sense of relief that people were starting to understand the job of work that needed to be done and continues to be done,” he said. “But now I think it will switch to, ‘We’re in a final, we’re huge underdogs, but there’s still a little chance there that we might just get something that will help us in our continuous progression into the next couple of years.’”
The fightback continues.
