With 53 minutes on the clock against Cork a fortnight ago, it was open to Liam Cahill to choose any adventure he fancied. His Tipperary team stood level at 1-17 apiece but had conceded four points on the bounce. They were exactly at the point where they were the rubber and Cork were the road.
Stop the clock. What would you do?
Consider that your players had taken an 18-point beating from Cork the previous time they’d played. Consider too that the league campaign so far had generally been middling-to-good and that not scaring the horses was an entirely acceptable option. The future has been a long time arriving in Tipp. Another 17 minutes wouldn’t have outraged anyone.
Cahill, however, has an instinct for exploration. He made two substitutions in the space of a minute. Off came Willie Connors and Bryan O’Mara, replaced by Oisín O’Donoghue and Michael Corcoran. Connors is in his eighth season as a Tipp senior, O’Mara is in his sixth. By contrast, both Corcoran and O’Donoghue made their senior debuts in this campaign.
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This wasn’t giving a couple of fresh faces a run out at the end of a nothing game. The fat was in the fire and Cahill’s message was unambiguous – let the young chefs cook. Nobody would have held caution against him. It was much more likely, in fact, that he’d have taken heat if it all went rancid.
Instead, here’s what happened. Tipperary outscored Cork the rest of the way by 1-5 to 0-4, a nifty 1-2 of which came from Dylan Walsh, Darragh McCarthy and O’Donoghue. Walsh and O’Donoghue were both making their second senior appearances for Tipp off the bench. McCarthy is the league’s top scorer but this was still only his fourth game out of underage.
“To be fair,” says Shane McGrath, “we knew about Darragh McCarthy, we knew about Robert Doyle, we knew about Oisín O’Donoghue and Sam O’Farrell and these guys. But we didn’t think we’d see the level of performance we’re getting from them now for another couple of years almost.
“People who would know the hurling landscape, who would know what’s going on in the schools and colleges and clubs, they would have known all these names. But the big thing so far is seeing how well these lads have adapted. It’s very early but you’d have to be encouraged by what you’ve seen so far.”
Top of Division 1A. Highest scorers in the top flight. Best points difference. Any county would take headline stats like those after four games of the league. But it’s the underlying numbers that tell the tale of what Cahill is looking for out of the spring campaign. And maybe even hint at what he’s getting.
So far, 10 new players have made their senior debut for Tipp in the 2025 league. Corcoran, McCarthy, O’Farrell and Walsh all started against Galway, with Doyle and Conor Martin coming in off the bench. Gavin O’Halloran and Josh Keller started against Wexford, with O’Donoghue a half-time sub. Joe Caesar played the full 70 minutes against Cork.
They won’t all last the road and some may not even see the summer. But they’ve come in and survived and Tipp are top of the league. A sound few months’ work in anyone’s language.
“I think they were helped massively by the Galway game,” McGrath says of their league opener in Salthill. “However good, bad or indifferent Galway were that first day out, it told some of these lads that they were able to mix it. If your first day out isn’t a good day, you can go into your shell and it can take you a whole campaign to come out of it again.
“You need to be able to find that confidence to say, ‘You know what? I am good enough to do this. I can live with this level.’ I know myself, it does take a year or two to get to that stage where you feel comfortable and you don’t have this impostor syndrome. Once you’re able to come in and do it against good teams, it’s a massive thing.”
If there’s a reason to imagine this might be different from other years, the wholesale league restructure might well be it. Everyone accepts that the league is still the league and none of this amounts to a hill of beans until they do it in the championship. But even so, this league has jeopardy for the first time in years and Cahill isn’t sending his young colts out and having to wonder if they’re facing a bunch of non-triers.
Contrast it to last year’s league in which Tipperary blooded eight rookies over the course of six games. Three of them came against Westmeath, another two against Antrim. By the time the Munster Championship opener against Limerick arrived in late April, only Seán Hayes made the starting 15. He has since been cut from the panel.
A lot of them are still in and around the place, all the same. Seánie Kenneally, Andy Ormond and Darragh Stakelum are both fighting for game-time in the full-forward line now that McCarthy and Walsh are on the scene. Danny Slattery and Billy Seymour are still on the panel but haven’t got a spin yet this year. Every minute is being earned.
“Little green shoots again as we go through this league,” said Cahill after the Cork game. “We are very conscious it is springtime. Summertime is when you are really going to be judged but springtime is important for this group of players, that we get our house in order and give ourselves a fighting chance in the summer.
“We just have a real good feeling about what we are doing. From myself, right through the squad, we are really enjoying our hurling at the moment. It is brilliant to be in that kind of a space, that you are enjoying your hurling and you are working so hard on other aspects as well to all feed into the success of trying to get back and compete with the bigger teams again in the championship come April.”
In some respects, the wheel was bound to turn eventually given the amount of underage success in Tipperary over the past decade or so. Walsh was on the All-Ireland winning minor team that Cahill himself managed back in 2016. Corcoran and O’Farrell were both Tipp minor captains – Corcoran of the 2020 team that lost a Munster final to Adam English’s Limerick crop, O’Farrell of the 2022 team that won the All-Ireland.
More recently, McCarthy, O’Donoghue and Martin were all on the team that just came up short against Offaly in last year’s All-Ireland under-20 final. All three are eligible at that grade again this year.
Go deeper again and Tipperary schools are going through a golden spell in the Harty Cup. When Thurles CBS beat St Flannan’s in this year’s final, it meant that Tipp schools had won Munster most famous schools' hurling trophy for the third successive year. Not alone that, but they’d won it with three different schools – Nenagh (led by Darragh McCarthy) won in 2024 and Cashel (with Oisín O’Donoghue to the fore) had done it in 2023. In the 105-year history of the Harty Cup, this is only the second time a county has done a three-in-a-row with three different schools.
“And the thing with that was that the year Cashel won it, they beat Thurles in the final,” says McGrath. “So there’s definitely good stuff coming through. You’d still like to see some of them come through and beat St Kieran’s some year. That’s always the big hurdle. But the main thing is you have a load of guys coming through underage ranks who are used to winning.
“They’re not afraid of Cork teams or Limerick teams. They’re well used to beating them. Tipp have a very good under-20 team this year that should have a great chance of getting out of Munster. These are all good, solid building blocks when it comes to getting players ready for senior hurling.”
Small straws in the wind. Last September, the Clubber TV streaming service showed the Waterford county final between Ballygunner and Abbeyside as its main weekend pick on the platform. When they crunched the numbers on Monday morning, the second most streamed game of the weekend was Toomevara v Borrisoleigh in the North Tipp under-19 A final. The reason? Darragh McCarthy.
The Toomevara forward turns 20 this year and already he has played every minute of Tipperary’s campaign. Despite the presence of Jason Forde and Gearóid O’Connor, he is the designated free-taker and has barely put a foot wrong. With Tipp enjoying last weekend off, he was Man of the Match for UL as they added the Freshers' hurling title to their Fitzgibbon Cup. The spring couldn’t have gone better so far, for him or for Tipperary.
And obviously, they know. It’s the first week of March and they’ve beaten a Galway team that didn’t turn up, an understrength Wexford, and a Cork side that is still finding its feet. Limerick beat them with half their starters missing. Kilkenny will take endless pleasure in kneecapping their fine start to the year.
“When it turns in Tipp, it turns quick,” notes McGrath. “They know that. The championship starts with Limerick in Thurles and then you’re straight off down to play Cork in Cork the following weekend. So nobody is under any illusions, getting out of Munster is going to be incredibly difficult.
“But there was a great feeling around Thurles on that Saturday night after the Cork game. That’s important. The crowd love to see a Tipperary team that is honest and hard-working and that has a few new lads coming through and showing they can do it. There’s a real honesty in the group, you can see that. It’s the number one sport in the county and people are enjoying seeing what might come together.”
It’s a start, no more than that.
Starts matter, all the same. No point pretending they don’t.
