It's a long way from there to here. Three months ago, as he contemplated a second successive Munster defeat by Limerick, Tipperary manager Eamon O'Shea must have had some sense that he was peering over the precipice. Yet that would be to misunderstand how he views his involvement in hurling.
In a much-quoted Sunday Miscellany broadcast on the morning of the 2012 All-Ireland final, O'Shea explained what the game meant to him and how it had chosen him rather than vice versa.
“All enduring love affairs must ultimately capture the heart, the soul and the imagination. For me hurling does that better than any other sport, mainly through the ties that bind us to people, places and local communities.”
This romantic view of the game is intricately linked to other aspects of the Tipperary manager. He is an exile, living in Galway but conscious of the ties that bind and also an academic, professor of economics at NUIG, whose cerebral inputs to the revival of Tipperary between 2008 and 2010 were widely admired at the time the county won the 2010 All-Ireland with Liam Sheedy as manager and O'Shea as coach.
Although the talk in Tipp has been of little else as the team strode through the qualifiers and then in the semi-final landed a haymaker on Munster champions Cork, he is reluctant to compare the triumphant season of four years ago with this year even though both have been routed through the qualifiers.
“I don’t know. 2010 was a different one in the sense that we were coming off the end of three years of where we were trying to get to a position, where we had a great year in 2009, and were beaten in 2010 by Cork. This time it’s slightly different . . . We’re four years down the road as well . . . but the fact that we have momentum is the same. That’s where the comparison is valid . . . you have to take these things as they come”.
Challenge
His vernacular is disarmingly intellectual in an arena as visceral as competitive sport, for instance when describing the challenge of managing: “A puzzle. You’re trying to see if you can get a performance from the team; you’re not trying to see whether you win or not, just can you get a performance from the team on the day.”
From an enthusiastically received return appointment as manager at the end of the desperate 2012 season to the best part of two years later, all he had to show for his renewed association with the team was two lost league finals and zero return from two championships.
The All-Ireland qualifier draw meant that Tipp had to fight another wounded team, Galway, in the first days of July. The requiem was ready with 20 minutes left and the match running beyond them. Impressive as the response was, was it driven by the high-octane fuel of having nothing let to lose?
“I’m not sure I see the world as nothing to lose or win. I don’t see it like that. I’m here trying to do a job. I came back to try and do a job and if it didn’t go the way I wanted it but I wouldn’t have felt any less a person. I tried everything, really tried hard and if it didn’t work it didn’t work and somebody else would have taken it on.
“When you know your team are trying, really working for you, then it’s a really good place to be.”
Four years after the great coup of wrecking Kilkenny’s five-in-a-row ambitions, he finds Brian Cody’s eternal contenders again providing the opposition in an All-Ireland final. Tipp haven’t beaten them in the championship since then despite playing every season in the meantime. O’Shea himself has lost two league finals to them in the past 16 months but he rejects any notion of baggage or pressure.
“It wouldn’t be an issue really except that you know we didn’t win the games. It’s not an issue given the way I think about the game. I know that if we perform we’ll be really competitive. The result may fall one way or the other but I’m not losing any sleep over it.”
When he says he never panicked or doubted when things were going badly, you have no option but to believe him given that his coordinates are so different.
“There’s been a really strong commitment to training,” he says, “to trying to get better. What you saw against Galway, the qualifier match we came back in, you’d have to ask where did the last 20 minutes came from?
“It came from the squad having a base-line belief that they could do something. I think a lot of that is down to themselves in terms of the way we’ve been training and our belief in what we do.
“We have a strong belief in ourselves and in our hurling. I have a strong belief in our hurling and I was delighted for them that it came together in that 20-minute spell – I wish we’d see a bit more of it! That’s the aim for the next day – can we get to that level?”
