After Cork eviscerated Tipperary by 18 points in last year’s Munster championship, Liam Cahill fronted up to reporters, as he always does. He ended his press conference by saying Tipperary were “officially going into a real rebuild job.” Limerick beat them by 15 points three weeks earlier, so by a process of humiliation, they had arrived at ground zero.
Cahill also said that he might be laying a foundation for whoever succeeded him and that was a reasonable forecast. Nobody had any grasp of a timeline for Tipp’s rehabilitation, though everyone accepted that it would involve pain and patience. Everybody was thinking about worst-case scenarios. As Tipp know from the 1970s and 1980s, time can disappear into a black hole.
For Tipp to win an All-Ireland 14 months after that demolition by Cork in Thurles has no precedent in the modern history of the championship. When they won the 2019 All-Ireland, it was only a year after they had failed to win a match in Munster. However, that 2019 team included nine players who had started the 2016 final, which Tipp won.
When Liam Sheedy came back for his second stint as manager for the 2019 season, he faced a refurbishment job. To start again, Cahill had to knock down walls and rewire the place. Dermot Bannon might have taken it on, but he’d have blown the budget and fallen out with everyone on site.
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During the off-season, there were 16 changes to the panel, which was more churn than any other elite team. Between the match-day 26 for the Cork game in the round-robin series last summer and the All-Ireland final on Sunday, there were 10 changes to the squad, including seven changes to the starting team.
That was an extraordinary through-put of players in such a short space of time. Even between the first round this year against Limerick and the final on Sunday, there were four changes in personnel and a change at goalkeeper, full back, centre back, centre field and centre forward. Andrew Ormond didn’t play a minute against Limerick, neither did Willie Connors.
Michael Breen spoke after the match about how “intense” training had been in January and February. Cahill finished last year listening to complaints that Tipp had trained too hard in the first part of the season and had nothing left for the championship. A similar charge had been levelled at him in his final season with Waterford.
Cahill accepted that they had made mistakes in their conditioning programme last year but that didn’t mean they were going to ease up. In January, nine days before their first league game against Galway, Tipp played Sarsfields in a challenge match in Riverstown. Sarsfields were building up to the All-Ireland club final and expected to get a hiding, but in the event, they didn’t lose by much.
Cahill was so exasperated by the performance that when the game was over, the Tipp players were made to do a block of running before they left the field. By that stage, they had already lost a challenge match against Dublin. Nobody had them tagged as dark horses. Before the quarter-finals, when there were only six teams remaining, they were still 10/1 shots for the All-Ireland with the bookies.
“I remember meeting Jake Morris a couple of weeks after [Tipp were eliminated in Munster last year] and you’re nearly ashamed going around to show your face because the manner in which we went out,” said Jason Forde. “And we said as a group all year, there’s nobody going to come and save us. We had to go back and put in the work and drag ourselves up out of it and thank God we did.”
Much has been made of the contribution of Darragh McCarthy, Sam O’Farrell and Oisín O’Donoghue from the Tipp under-20s squad. It flew in the face of all modern trends for players of that age to make such an impactful breakthrough at senior level. On the biggest day of all, McCarthy had his best game of the season.
But just as critical was the reinvigoration of Jason Forde and John McGrath. At the end of last season, there was no guarantee that either of them would carry on. Forde met Cahill for a conversation during the off-season and maybe he didn’t know which way it would go.
“He wasn’t talking me around anyway,” said Forde. “It was a very honest conversation. After the season finished, you were meeting people and they were saying were you going to bother going back, nearly writing you off that you were finished. When I met Liam, I just said we couldn’t leave things like that, the year that we had. Having played for Tipp for 13 seasons and winning All-Irelands and things like that, to leave it on that note, it just wouldn’t have felt right.”
Forde, though, had been a regular starter on the team last year. McGrath had appeared just twice in the championship for a combined total of 40 minutes. The last time he had started a championship game for Tipp was in 2022; the last time he had started and finished a championship match was in 2020. Injuries played a part in that, but form was a greater reason.
This year, McGrath was reborn. He finished the championship with 7-16, making him the joint top scorer from play alongside Dublin’s Cian O’Sullivan. Nobody else scored seven goals. Not only that, but all his goals were consequential: two against Limerick, two against Clare, one against Kilkenny when Tipp were bailing water, and two in the All-Ireland final, when he plunged the dagger into Cork.
In 14 months, their world had gone from night to day. In the second half in Thurles last year, Cork outscored them by 3-15 to 0-7; on Sunday, Tipp won the second half by 3-14 to 0-2. Redemption can never have tasted so sweet.
