About 15 minutes after the final whistle the slow-moving cordon of stewards had herded the Tipperary supporters into a peninsula of ground in front of the Mackey Stand. Over the public address they had already been warned, twice, that the water sprinklers were about to be turned on. They laughed the first time and paid no heed the second time. There were no sudden movements to the exits. Nobody got wet.
In Tipp’s resurgent summer, this was another sunny day. Finding a path to Croke Park is the solemn mission for every Tipp manager, but there were times in Liam Cahill’s difficult second season when it must have seemed like it was in another galaxy, far away.
It is little more than a year since they bottomed out against Cork in Thurles, on a mortifying day when thousands of their supporters ran for cover. From that game to this, there were nine changes to Tipp’s starting 15. In such a short time, their rehabilitation has been remarkable.
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When they look again, they will find kinks in this performance. Galway were so disjointed and disorientated at times that it is impossible to use them as a reliable benchmark. But Tipp were full of pace and directness in attack and bristled with energy all over the field. In a game where levels of aggression struggled to reach championship pitch and license to play was granted freely by both teams, Tipp still won with authority.
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For Galway, it was another performance undermined by inaccuracy and an absence of conviction. Between the league and championship, Galway have lost four games by 12 points this year, and with an hour played here they found themselves 12 behind again. In the event Galway lost by eight points, just as they had done in the Leinster final. Once again, though, they had not threatened to win.
In the first half, when the game was ripe for the picking, they made four or five incisions in the Tipp cover, seeking out goals. But those moves ultimately only forced one save from Rhys Shelly. The others perished on various kinds of clunkiness.
When the goal they so badly needed finally arrived, five minutes into the second half, they squandered the momentum. Colm Molloy squirmed along the endline and beat Shelly with a fierce diagonal shot, reducing Tipp’s lead to just two points. Playing with the breeze, the game was there to be seized. Galway couldn’t; Tipp did.
The outstanding Andrew Ormond scored immediately from the puck-out, igniting a run of six Tipp points without reply. In the same 11-minute period Galway hit five debilitating wides. Without doing anything out of the ordinary, Tipp essentially put the game beyond Galway’s reach.
Liam Cahill bemoaned Tipp’s efficiency afterwards. Between play and dead balls they had a staggering 51 shots at the target operating at a 57 per cent conversion rate. In Cahill’s estimation, “10 or 15” shots had been the wrong decision. To beat Kilkenny in an All-Ireland semi-final, they will need to add the guts of 10 percentage points to that number.
“We’ll look at that and we’ll see, but that’s a very interesting stat,” said Cahill. “Our shots off are important. Every team is chasing it now because you have to be in the 30-point bracket or the 2-25, 3-25 to have any chance of winning an All-Ireland.”
Their potential for heavy scoring, though, is obvious. In the first half, especially, Galway were bamboozled by the fluidity and interplay of the Tipp forwards. By the break, only Darragh McCarthy had failed to score from play: the other five had scored 13 points; Jake Morris, John McGrath, Ormond and Sam O’Farrell had combined for eight assists too.
The difference between the forward lines was cohesion. The Tipp forwards moved in harmony and found each other with instant passes. Time and again, one of their shooters was picked out in a pocket of space. Every invitation to shoot was accepted.
At the other end, very little of Galway’s play was economical. They had two eight-minute spells when they failed to score, and another of 11 minutes. Scores are so plentiful in the game now that nobody can afford any shut down in productivity. They finished the game with 16 wides and half a dozen unrealised goal chances. By the end they were reduced to pot shots, one of which spun out of Shelly’s hand in the last minute of stoppage time and staggering over the goal line.
After the Leinster final, Micheál Donoghue was adamant that Galway had not played the way they had planned, and that was surely the case again. After Henry Shefflin’s three years in charge, this Galway team needed an identity and a sustainable way of playing. This season, they never reached those goals.
They coughed up 1-14 from turnovers and just eight of their scores came from play. In a knockout game, against a team from their peer group, all of that was unbearable.
“Look, today is raw,” said Donoghue afterwards, scrambling for a silver lining. “Today will hurt. In terms of where we are, where they came from last year, today might not be the right day to say it is a step forward [but] I think we have made a step forward. There are huge learnings to take from the season. We will reflect on that and regroup again.”
Maybe they have bottomed out. Tipp know how that feels. They made a new start.
