Eight games ago, Tipperary were playing in the All-Ireland semi-final. Tomorrow, they travel to Wexford Park desperate for a first win of the year in Division Four. Eight games ago, they were Munster champions, darlings of the lockdown championship, a curlicue of good news sprucing up the wrought iron doom of the 2020 winter. Now they sit 30th out of the 32 league teams, back down to earth. Splat.
Since their day of days in the 2020 Munster final, Tipperary’s record reads Played 8 Lost 6 Won 1 Drew 1. They were relegated from Division Three South of last year’s league with only a win over Wicklow to speak up for them. Kerry gave them the usual rinsing in Munster and now they’ve started their Division Four campaign with a draw against Waterford and defeat at home to Leitrim. If they don’t win in Wexford, promotion is all but gone.
David Power has been there for the best days in Tipp football and he’s been there for the worst. There have been far more of the latter – deeper, darker holes than this in fact. But he knows nobody wants to hear about it. Tipp were a volcano no time ago, they surely can’t have gone dormant already.
“We’re in the right division for us at this moment in time,” Power reasons. “We are in transition and it’s where we belong, given how we have played. And if we’re not good enough to get out of Division Four, then that tells you all you need to know about us. We know what we have to do.”
So where did it all go wrong? Well, for one thing, it was always going to be unlikely that 2020 would turn out to be the start of something. A first Munster title in 85 years was beyond the imaginations of the more fervent Tipp football people. In and of itself, it was where all the good work at underage, all the tending to the crops going back over a decade had been leading. You don’t generally get to use Everest as a launchpad.
And you definitely don’t when circumstances unfurl the way they did. The Tipperary footballers got no bounce from their Munster title at least in part because they never got to share it with the rest of Tipperary football.
Special time
“It was so surreal,” Power says. “The day itself was lovely. It was lovely to be able to celebrate in our own space. There weren’t people pulling out of us. I’ll never forget the dressing room, it was our special time that we’ll have forever.”
Problem was, the pandemic rendered it an entirely contained thing. There was no mass homecoming. They never got to bring the cup around the schools. There was plenty of love and good wishes for them but it was all disparate and out there in the ether. There was nothing communal about it, no bandwagon to jump on, no big day out in Croke Park for the whole county to plug into.
It was a remote experience for everyone, including Power and the squad themselves. Still is, to a certain extent. Fourteen months later, they still haven’t marked it properly. There’s been no dinner, no big night out even. And the further you get from it, the more difficult it is to harness what was special about it.
“We haven’t been able to celebrate what we achieved,” he says. “Like, I still haven’t had a pint with the players to celebrate winning the Munster final! We haven’t had a medal presentation yet. We haven’t gone to the schools. All of it just fell by the wayside and it wasn’t possible to do any of those things.
“We have missed out on cashing in the chips of that Munster title. We have missed out on the chance to raise the profile of Tipperary football and of getting momentum from it. And that’s down to Covid. Now, at the same time, you can say that if it wasn’t for Covid, we wouldn’t have won one in the first place. But for us, we’re after doing a thing that wasn’t done for 85 years in Tipperary and we should be very proud of that fact.”
On a more tangible level, the story of Tipp football since November 2020 is devastatingly simple. They’ve haemorrhaged players, losing them for every reason you can think of. It was a miracle that the planets aligned for Colin O’Riordan to play for them in the short window he was home from Sydney Swans so he was always going to be leaving again.
Simply walked away
But since he went back to Australia, Power has lost players to retirement, others to work commitments abroad, still others to the travel plans that were put off when the pandemic hit. Some players have gone hurling, others have simply walked away from the panel.
They haven’t been bit-parters either. Power has seen players of the calibre of Michael Quinlivan, Alan Campbell, Philip Austin, Brian Fox and Liam Casey walk out the door for one reason or another. You can call it an excuse or you can call it an explanation. The effect has been the same, one way or the other.
“Against Leitrim the last day, we were down 14 of the players who were in the 26 against Cork in the Munster final in 2020. People look at your results and they wonder, ‘What’s going on there?’ But that’s the reality.
“I hate complaining. I hate to hear myself complaining. I’m just not one for doing it. But that’s where were are. You’re talking about big leaders and big players. No team can really do without those guys – you’re even seeing Dublin now trying to find their feet without some of their bigger names. No team can afford to lose key players because they’re they heart and soul of the place. They drive what you’re trying to do.”
It’s a perfect storm, too. Life wouldn’t be so bad if the bodies walking out the door were being replaced by a tranche of underage stars bucking and pawing the ground to be let loose. But that isn’t the case here. The Tipperary conveyor belt that brought through such quality a decade ago is altogether more sparse and slow-moving these days.
“It was different in 2014, ’15, ’16,” Power says. “You had a bunch of players coming through who had won minor All-Irelands, who were competing at under-21, playing in Munster finals and all that. They were in an All-Ireland under-21 final against Tyrone in 2016, very unlucky not to win. The minors got to an All-Ireland final the same year and lost to Kerry but Kerry were beating everyone at minor through those years. So you knew you had players coming through in waves at that time.
“But since 2015, underage has been very, very poor in Tipperary, bar getting to Munster under-20 final last year against Cork. So we’re just going through a rough period. Funny, we think training has been going quite well but it’s just not happening when it comes to match day. A lot of fellas are missing but with the group that we have available, they’re capable of performing a lot better.”
Struggle
As ever, fighting a football war on a hurling battlefield is a struggle. Last season they got a year out of Conor Bowe, a brilliant underage dual star. Power was never under any illusions – Bowe is a former Munster under-20 Hurler of the Year and his time with the footballers was as much about getting a year of intercounty physical development into him as anything. Once Colm Bonnar called him into his league panel, Power sent him off with a good heart.
“We developed Conor last year within the football panel and he has got the call from the hurlers. And look, that’s going to happen. I’m not complaining here at all. I know where I’m living. I grew up with Tipperary GAA. I go to every Tipp hurling match that I can. I know that 99 times out of 100, when a young fella gets a call from the hurlers, they’re going to drop the football.
“That’s the reality of it. But at the same time, Tipperary’s a big enough county that we should be able to be competitive in football as well. I’m not saying the we can compete at the very, very top but we can be better than we what we’ve shown so far.”
They will keep trucking. Power has been at the coalface long enough to know that the next nugget can turn up at any time. They haven’t been good in Division Four so far but it won’t take an awful lot to turn it around. A few decent performances, a run of results, the Tailteann Cup later in the year – there’s plenty not written in the books yet.
“When I took over the Tipp minor footballers in 2009, in one of my early meetings with them I said, ‘Within the next three years, we’re going to win a football All-Ireland.’ The whole room was laughing at me and people were saying, ‘Would you stop with that stuff, we’ll be lucky if we beat Waterford.’
“I always look at the positives. Even now, even though we are going through the mill at the moment. I won’t lie to you, the couple of days after the Leitrim game, you’re questioning yourself the whole time. Can we do things better? What needs to improve?
“I’m not going to be Tipperary manager forever. Our battle now is to leave Tipp football in a place where the next man who takes it on has something to go on. I want to leave it in a good place and we’re not in a good place at the minute. I have seen that there are young fellas there who we can develop. Give us 12 to 18 months and we can maybe start climbing up through the league tables again. But it will take time.”
