In Liam Cahill’s post-match huddle with reporters after Tipperary eviscerated Galway on the opening day of the National League nine questions were put to him. He wasn’t asked about the Tipperary supporters, but in answer to the second last question Cahill brought them into the conversation, stepping on to a diplomatic tightrope. For balance he had a carrot and a stick.
“I mentioned bravery there earlier about the direction we’re going and the change we have to make,” he said. “I’d ask the Tipp supporters to be brave as well and come out and support them. There’s not much bravery in going up to Croke Park every year over the last decade for All-Ireland semi-finals and All-Ireland finals and all that.
“These players will be around long after I’m gone. They’re the catalyst to everything that gives us the joy that is being a Tipperary supporter.”
Cahill’s answers are rarely strangled by self-censorship; he is straight and never short. But the cold distance between this team and the Tipperary public has troubled him for a while. In 2023, his first season as manager, they upended Clare in Ennis in the opening round of the championship and drew with Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh after a storming performance. In his post-match press conference that evening he applauded the “small” Tipperary crowd who had been heavily “outnumbered” that evening and pleaded for reinforcements. For emphasis, he used the word “small” twice.
A year earlier, when Tipp’s season was sinking in quicksand under different management, they disturbed Limerick for an hour in the Gaelic Grounds, but it was alarming how few Tipperary supporters had travelled. Padraic Maher, who was one of Cahill’s selectors in 2023, tweeted about it at the time: “Very poor support for our boys in Limerick today,” he wrote. “They deserve better.”
Against Cork last May the numbers reached a stultifying nadir. To have any chance of staying in the championship both teams needed to win; Semple Stadium, though, was bathed in red. Babs Keating was canvassing for the European Elections with the former GAA president Seán Kelly, and they stood on the brow of the railway bridge.
“All we could see coming up the road was Cork supporters,” says Keating. “It must have been 10 to 1. It was never seen before.” The attendance in Thurles that day was given as 43,792; at least 35,000 were from Cork.
In the GAA desertion is a common affliction. Every intercounty team is followed by a standing army of unblinking loyalists and a Dad’s Army of reservists, who prefer to avoid losing battles. In that respect, Tipp are no different from everybody else. But in a county of Tipp’s size and history of success and livid passion for the game, everything is amplified. Winning is a carnival; losing is an opera.
“What I would compare it to is Manchester United,” says Tommy Dunne, the former Tipperary captain, selector and coach. “Man United are in the news every day. With Tipp there is a spotlight there all the time – and probably more so when things aren’t going well. In Tipp you are expected to win. You measure yourself on really, really high standards. That’s the thing. When you lose there is hell to pay.
“I was only thinking the other day about when Cork beat us below in Killarney [2004 qualifiers]. I remember going into work two days after, ashamed of my life. F**king ashamed of my life. I was working in a place in Nenagh with 400 or 500 people and I was going around with the head down, hoping you wouldn’t meet someone that was going to have a go at you about the match, or even just offer sympathy to you. You wouldn’t know what to say. That was real life, and it’s not any different now I’m sure.”
In every county there is a triangular relationship between the team, the supporters and the local media. Cahill has spent the last three years trying to navigate that space without impaling himself on the sharp corners. Last Sunday in his post-match comments he spoke, pointedly, about the “knowledgeable people who know the hurling landscape in Tipp” and understand that this team will need time; but he also referenced the “impatient, less knowledgeable Tipperary hurling folk,” who will heckle that process. That intellectual divide is not unique to Tipp either; every manager must suffer it.
In many ways Cahill is hard-nosed, and he expects his players to be tough, but in some ways he is sensitive. After Tipp fell to their fourth defeat in last year’s Munster championship Cahill was asked by Shane Brophy of the Nenagh Guardian if he would be staying on for the final year of his term. It was a perfectly legitimate question, but his response was prickly and defensive.
“I take umbrage to that question,” he said, before asserting that he enjoyed the support of the county board and the dressingroom. Managers don’t necessarily need an overall majority. Cahill and Brophy continued the conversation in another room when the press conference finished and in the following week’s Nenagh Guardian Brophy offered his side of the argument.
“The Tipp manager did express his annoyance to me over the headline used in this paper last week describing Tipperary as ‘The Whipping Boys of Munster,’” wrote Brophy. “It’s not a nice headline, I agree. However, I stand by it. When you are losing championship games by 15 and 18 points to Limerick and Cork respectively there is no sugar-coating it – facts are facts ... I loved the fire in his response [to my question]. I was caught a little by surprise I admit, but I’m a grown man, I can take it.”
In a phone call after the Tipperary county final five months later the two men resolved their differences. But nobody lives in a soundproofed room and the modern world bristles with noise. Cahill pays attention. JJ Kennedy has been writing his esteemed Westside column in the Nationalist newspaper since 1981 and last Monday night he appeared on Tipp FM to review the Galway game.
His contribution was balanced and temperate. The gist of it was that nobody should expect Tipp to win anything this year, but producing a competitive team was both achievable and necessary. In last year’s Munster championship Tipp’s scoring difference was minus 36 and there was a destructive pattern of final quarter fade-outs. Cahill accepts that they got the team’s conditioning wrong.
But 16 new players have been added to the squad in the off-season, which is more churn than any other elite team in the country. After he came off air Cahill texted Kennedy, essentially to say thanks.
“Look he’s under pressure at the moment, there’s no doubt about that,” says Kennedy. “He has been taking a lot of flak. He is sensitive to that, and he does react to it. I was saying to him, the genuine followers know where Tipperary are at, and you can’t work miracles. The other ones are just background noise.
“Hurling is part of the daily conversation here in Tipperary and people take it very seriously. When things go bad criticism flies, and you just have to suck it up really.”
But if the game is such a local obsession where have the supporters gone? Michael Bourke is a former chairman of the county board and is now chairman of the Tipperary supporters' club. When it was set up during Babs Keating’s first stint as manager nearly 40 years ago it was the first such enterprise in the country, and in the years since they have raised more than €8 million, a staggering amount.
Last year they raised nearly €100,000. Supporters are still prepared to put their hands in their pockets. “Maybe some people are fickle in their view and they don’t see prosperity,” says Bourke. “Maybe there’s an expectation from our supporters that we should be in Croke Park every year, and that would be your dream – but that doesn’t happen. Everyone hits a lean period. Now, Liam is bringing in a huge amount of young, energetic players, and they will capture the trust of the public.”
The absenteeism, though, is difficult to ignore or explain away. “It’s hard to make sense of it,” says Dunne. “It means so much to many people and yet so many people don’t go and follow the team. What I do remember from playing is the feeling that letting down supporters is the worst feeling in the world.
“It happened a few times when we were playing and you never forget it. There is a responsibility there and that is part of playing for Tipp. There are certain standards that you must meet. That is a savage challenge for a group of players year after year. I was conscious of the pressure of being a Tipp player, I’m certain about that. Did it affect me? Did it bother me? It did affect me. There’s no getting away from that.
“The jersey weighs a bit heavier when things aren’t right. But I still love the fact that it carries so much weight with the public. I still love it because it means something. We are a county of substance, of tradition, we are a county with history – that’s still there.”
After the Cork game last year Dunne sent Cahill a text in solidarity. He says he wouldn’t normally do something like that, but it was an excruciating a day for everyone who cared about the jersey. They had played together for a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and like Cahill, Dunne had not been afraid to step into management, first with Declan Ryan and later with Liam Sheedy. On the sideline nobody wears a helmet.
“It was as bad, if not worse [being involved in management],” he says. “My perception is that the public look to the management first in terms of blame or accountability, and that’s perfectly understandable. I remember the debacle of the All-Ireland semi-final in 2012 and the shame and embarrassment I felt [as a coach] incredibly hard. It was horrendous, absolutely horrendous. This feeling that we got it so badly wrong and it was on us.
“But you step into those roles and the reality is that that kind of stuff is never far from your door. There’s no point in looking for sympathy or living in a pretence that it’s not going to happen because you’re only one performance away from negativity or maybe abuse. I’m not saying that’s right – that’s just the way it is.
“But every year I was involved with Tipperary I believed we could win a championship. I’d be surprised if that still isn’t in the Tipperary manager’s psyche right now. I think you’re hard-wired to think that. All logic might say, ‘you can’t, you shouldn’t, you won’t.’ But the hard-wired part of me says, ‘we’re Tipperary, and therefore anything is possible.’ What are we if we lose that?”
That part is safe, come what may.
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