Getting it right on the day is not an exact science. In every aspect of preparation, GAA teams have more access to expert help than ever before, but sometimes a team is flat, over the top, or in the wrong frame of mind and when the ball is thrown in there’s no getting away from it.
That happened to two teams in Limerick last Saturday. I watched Dublin come out of the tunnel under the Mackey Stand before their match against Clare and I couldn’t believe they were walking. This was an All-Ireland quarter-final, the biggest game of their season; I expected them to burst on to the field, full of energy, mad to get stuck in.
Watching them I was thinking, ‘what’s their mentality?’ One of the things every player can control is body language. Your team-mates can see it, your opponents can see it. Poor body language puts you on the back foot straight away. That wasn’t the reason why Dublin lost, but their mentality was a big part of the reason why they didn’t put up a bigger fight. It looked to me like their heads weren’t in the right place.
Tipperary weren’t in the right place either. Liam Cahill said he could see after 10 or 15 minutes that they had no spark. Tipp were so bad that Galway should have beaten them by 10 or 12 or 15 points.
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I thought Tipp had a right chance, and judging by some stuff I heard on a Tipperary GAA podcast before the match, that was probably the general view in Tipperary too. The lads on the podcast were talking about how many goals Jake Morris and Mark Kehoe were going to get. Maybe the Tipp players were picking up these vibes around the place.
As it turned out, Morris and Kehoe failed to score; Kehoe was taken off at half-time, along with Seamie Callanan, who also failed to score. Noel McGrath was taken off in the second half, having been a key player for Tipp all season. Galway targeted him with Sean Linnane and he really got inside McGrath. It was a meltdown for Tipp in every way except on the scoreboard.
After the way Waterford’s season fizzled out last year, questions were asked straight away about Liam Cahill’s ability to manage a team’s freshness during a compressed season. Everyone knew that Tipperary’s training in November and December had been savage. The feeling among the Tipp players last year was that they hadn’t been fit enough, and the new management obviously believed they had ground to make up.
That fitness showed during the League and in the first three games of the Munster championship, but when they needed performances against Waterford and Galway there was very little in the tank. When Galway got physical last Saturday a lot of the Tipp players didn’t want to know about it. Cahill demands aggression from all his teams, but on this occasion, it just wasn’t there.
Tipp are going to have a tough six months reflecting on this. Cahill said afterwards that he was going to freshen up the panel for next year. Some of the older players and leaders in that dressing-room might walk away, which will leave big holes to fill.
When you boil it down, Tipp have won just three championship matches against Liam MacCarthy teams since they won the All-Ireland in 2019: two games against Clare and one against Cork. For a county with their resources, and their recent history of U-20 success under Cahill, that record is worrying for them. Will they have to rethink how they approach their loading during the season? Definitely.
Sometimes, though, it doesn’t even come down to that. In hindsight, when Galway lost the 2018 All-Ireland final to Limerick, we were probably out of gas. It was our ninth championship match of the summer, including replays in the Leinster final and the All-Ireland semi-final.
We played three round-robin games in the Leinster championship on successive weekends, and there were just seven days between our two draws and the replays. Really intensive bursts. We ended up with just a fortnight to prepare for the All-Ireland final when Limerick had three weeks.
Every team only has a fortnight between the All-Ireland semi-finals and finals now and that’s a real challenge. That extra week makes a huge difference. In practical terms, it means you have more time to rest in the days after the semi-final, and more time to taper in the final week. Between the two middle weekends, you will get four serious sessions done. With a two-week build-up, you’re only going to be able to fit in two serious sessions.
In the lead-up to the 2018 final we didn’t realise we had gone over the top. You’re not thinking in those terms. You’re trying to keep all negativity out of your mind. But I went into that game carrying an injury, and so did Daithí Burke and Gearóid McInerney, and a couple of others. We just didn’t have time to recover.
Whatever about your physical state, you’re doing everything you can to get yourself into the right frame of mind, and there’s no fixed, guaranteed way to achieve that. We didn’t have any beef with Limerick at the time, but for a championship match you need something to steel your mind. You need a bit of spice. It’s not a question of hating the opposition, but having a reason to dislike them is useful.
Tom Ryan, the former Limerick manager, wrote something in his newspaper column that Micheal Donoghue spotted, and he gave us all a copy of it to read. Ryan had nothing to do with the Limerick team we were playing, but Donoghue just wanted our blood to be boiling a little bit. Even with all the science available to managers and players now, that kind of stuff still goes on: searching for an angle.
On the day, we just didn’t have enough in the tank. We weren’t bouncing off the ground, the way you should be. We didn’t have as much bite as Limerick. The other games had taken too much out of us. Once the match starts, there’s no way of fixing that.
In the new championship system, managing your mental energy and your physical energy during a tough, intensive campaign is a serious challenge for everyone. Tipperary failed to manage that, and last Saturday they paid a heavy price.
