It's rare for a league final to transform perceptions to the extent that Sunday's annihilation of Tipperary has. The carefully nurtured narrative that this would be a different type of All-Ireland defence by the champions than the county has managed in the past 50 years took root early in the season.
Manager Michael Ryan’s credibility as the overseer of this project was unchallenged, as he had been the man to take the team from its years of going close to winning the MacCarthy Cup. Just as he had developed a harder edge to the team and an enhanced defensive sensibility so too he had stressed the point from last September that the challenge now was to set about retaining the title rather than celebrating it.
The most obvious way of doing that would be to take the league seriously and ideally, win it. There was though a sense that he was a little anxious at all the determinism: Tipp were now champions and success would build on success because they knew that was how it had to be.
After the league win over Clare, Ryan pointed out that the results were going their way but that there hadn’t been some epiphany as to how a team maintains success and that pervious sides had trained and prepared for matches in much the same way but outcomes hadn’t always gone their way.
No matter. On this occasion, Tipperary were perceived as the top team in the country and almost in consequence, they had the deepest panel and the brightest prospects. Much of this perception owes its origins to Kilkenny, who with a truly great team in the Cody era did set about winning multiple titles: seven All-Irelands in the 2000s plus five league titles, followed in the current decade by another four championships and three leagues.
Amassing silverware is the undisputed way of proving a team's status but it's not that easy. It's not just Tipperary who find it hard to win back-to-back All-Irelands. In the 52 years since the county last achieved that, only Kilkenny have managed serial retention of the All-Ireland. Cork have done it a couple of times and Galway once.
If you take Kilkenny out of it (and even they did it only three times, 2003, 2009 and 2012), very few teams have been so dominant that they can carry September form through into the next season and add the league title. You have to go back to Galway in 1989 to find the previous incidence of this.
It’s one thing of course to target the league as All-Ireland champions and come up short – in the only other example since 1965 of getting to a league final as champions, Tipp lost to Limerick in 1992 by a point – and another to get a profound beating that questions nearly everything you previously regarded as a strength.
Kilkenny lost league finals in 2007 and 2011 and responded by winning the All-Ireland but the previous time that happened was back in 1995 when Clare recovered from losing to Kilkenny in May.
Surprisingly what happened in Limerick on Sunday wasn’t even the biggest defeat for All-Ireland champions in a league final. In 1974, Limerick who had taken what remains the county’s only All-Ireland in the past 77 years lost the following spring against Cork by a whopping 6-15 to 1-12.
Limerick is an interesting example because speaking 20 years later, Eamonn Cregan, a member of that team, said that although they had convinced themselves that they were working just as hard as when they won the All-Ireland in 1973 and pushing themselves as relentlessly, behind it all they weren't. His brother Michael was the team's physical trainer and he gave a frank assessment with another All-Ireland contest against Kilkenny on the horizon.
“In 1974 we did the same training but six weeks before the final, Mick told us we weren’t as focused and our commitment was less. We thought we were but we weren’t.”
Kilkenny got revenge for the previous year’s final with a 12-point win and the league final had in its own way proved prophetic.
Sunday’s result re-wrote the narrative. Had Tipperary won the league they would have sailed into the championship clearly the top team at present. Now questions are raised by the underwhelming conclusion to the regulation league campaign, the draw against Kilkenny after losing an eight-point lead and the defeat, albeit with an under-strength team, in Cork – followed by the cakewalk against Offaly in the quarter-finals.
Suddenly the semi-final win over Wexford becomes more about the hour when the match was a serious contest and less about the pyrotechnics in the closing minutes.
By Monday morning former Clare and Galway manager Ger Loughnane had deemed the champions "not even a good team, let alone a great one". His own Clare team, All-Ireland champions at the time, lost a league semi-final against Cork in 1998 by 11 points, leaving him saying at the time: "In the last three years we've never been in the position we're in going home this evening. How we react to that will determine the year".
They went on to win Munster and should have added the All-Ireland but their prospects disappeared into a sink-hole of controversy later that summer.
Galway were undeniably impressive on Sunday but it’s much the same team that has contested knife-edge All-Ireland semi-finals against Tipperary in the past two years. Has the balance shifted to such an enormous extent or are the champions hitting a wall?
Michael Ryan didn't have ready answers in the aftermath at the Gaelic Grounds but he may have touched on the reality for champions – a reality distorted to an extent by Kilkenny's domination of the previous decade and a half.
“These guys, they’re not machines. We had certainly laid our plans upon winning today and being able to rest the guys for the week ahead. We’ll still follow that plan, but it is a real concern of ours just in terms of the workload that’s expected from them.”
