It took precisely one second of his championship debut for Dan McCormack to show why he was in the Tipperary team. The preliminaries were out of the way in Semple Stadium way back in May and as Barry Kelly got ready to throw the ball in between Tipp and Cork, players from both sides got drawn into midfield as though the referee had pulled a bath plug. By the time Kelly let go of the ball, McCormack was standing right in front of him, a centre-forward in number only.
Rules isn’t always rules. By rights, Kelly should have hunted him back to his position. But instead of throwing in between the four midfielders, he started the game by tossing the sliotar at the feet of McCormack and Christopher Joyce. McCormack got his hurley down, flicked the ball up and set off on a sprint that led to a line ball that led to Tipp’s first point with only 20 seconds on the clock. He wasn’t supposed to be there but he wasn’t asking permission.
Mick Ryan’s first season as Tipperary manager could have gone any number of ways. He could have done any number of things to the team.
Most tempting of all, he could have done nothing. They were, after all, only a point away from an All-Ireland final, just a year after being just a Hawk-Eye call away from being champions. Keep the car running and it was no bad bet that the road would lead somewhere good.
New blood
Instead, the story of Tipp’s championship has been the quiet but deliberate way Ryan has overhauled the team and flushed it with new blood. McCormack was one of four championship debutants against Cork – Séamus Kennedy, Seán Curran and John McGrath were the others.
Ronan Maher and Michael Breen had seen game time under the previous regime but not consistently and not as lynchpins. In 2016, they’ve been repurposed at centre-back and midfield. They’re made men, young for the job they’ve been handed but given their head to thrive at it all the same.
The thread running through all the changes has been clear enough to anyone watching. The Tipp team Ryan took over had been involved in by a distance the game of the year for both of the previous two seasons. Problem was, they’d won neither of them.
Beautiful loserdom is not a great look at any point of the season but it especially stinks when it happens in Croke Park with everything on the line.
“If you analysed last year’s semi-final through the eyes of a defender, which is what Mick Ryan is, protection has to be the first instinct,” says Eoin Kelly. “It’s the same with Donal Óg and Davy Fitz in Clare. I have no doubt that Mick Ryan sat down at some stage after that game against Galway last year and said: ‘Right, it was an exhibition, great. But we conceded 26 points.’
‘Average concession’
“I think he decided that he needed defenders who would mark. They mightn’t hit a world of ball but they would actually mark and defend. Someone like Séamus Kennedy fits that bill to a tee. Has anyone scored a point off him in his first three games in Munster? That’s what Mick wanted, first and foremost. Whatever happens, I don’t think they’ll be conceding 26 points to Galway this time around.”
So far in 2016, Tipp have reduced their average concession to a miserly 15 points a game. For context, their average concession over the four seasons before this one were 20.3 (2015), 22.28 (2014), 20.5 (2013) and 24.5 (2012). The only goal they’ve given up came in the 73rd minute of the game against Limerick when they were more or less out the gap anyway.
They’re giving away an average of just eight points a game from play. They have become mean from front to back. Kelly has seen an attitude adjustment right across the pitch, much of it brought about through the changes in personnel. It’s no accident that most of the new blood is young blood – there’s noticeably less independent spirit in the side than was there before. Might be no bad thing.
“There’s certain things that Mick Ryan has hammered into them and that’s why Séamus Kennedy has slotted in there. That’s what it looks like to me. Kieran Bergin liked to get forward a bit, maybe liked to go for his own score every now and then.
“He would have had a tendency to try and go for a shot and I’d say, in fairness, that Mick has just decided that there are plenty of fellas in the Tipperary team already to do that.
“Pádraic Maher is back in his best position at number seven and Ronan Maher is there to sit in the pocket at six. When you add in Séamus at five, basically the whole thing is a lot tighter and a lot more compact. There’s a better structure there than was the case before. They haven’t coughed up too many goal chances at all.
“Like, they gave away a goal against Limerick that was near the bitter end and even their body language after it went in would tell you they were disgusted. They would have savaged each other after it – Darren Gleeson was spitting, you could see it. I think they go into these games now with the mindset of, ‘This doesn’t happen. We’ve made a pact here about not conceding goals and here we’ve let one in in the 73rd minute’. That’s the change that’s in them since last year.”
It wouldn’t quite be on the money to say the changes have met with universal approval. While it’s true that Munster was mopped up without a huge amount of fuss, something about the provincial campaign has left doubts lingering still within the county. Maybe it was that the games were all in the rain and Tipp needed a certain dogfight quality to win them. That’s not the sexiest label to hang on a team.
But then again, Tipp were sexy for long enough. Kelly was on plenty of those Tipp sides that got the blood pumping but too often ended up on the wrong side of beatings from decidedly unsexy Kilkenny teams. So while he hears all the murmuring around the place about the likes of McCormack and what it is he brings to the team, Kelly can see the argument for having him there.
“Dan McCormack is a player that all I hear is how much Mick Ryan loves him. Because he’s over six foot, he’s robust, he’s a big, hard grafter who can block and hook and get in among the opposition. He’s not the fanciest player in the world but he’s down Mick Ryan’s street.
“I would say that Mick was tired of looking at six Noel McGraths in his forward line. That’s probably the best way to put it. Tipp had a forward line where there was skill in abundance, a load of players who’d put the ball in your eye if you asked them to. But there was nobody there who’d kill a fella for you. Mick wanted to get a couple of players in there who’d bust a defender coming out with the ball and protect his defence that way. That’s why he has Dan McCormack in there.”
Even the one quicksilver forward that has been swept in on the new broom has a bit more dog in him than the usual Tipp corner-forward. John McGrath can sometimes look a carbon copy of his brother Noel, his swing always smart and economical, his timing positively Swiss. But in attitude, he is more expressive than Noel and far more likely to get riled.
‘Bit edgier’
“John picked up a bad injury last year,” Kelly says. “He was going nicely in the league but something happened his back and they did a scan and he had some sort of fracture in a vertebra. That put his intercounty career on hold even before it had started.
“But to me, John McGrath seems a little bit edgier than Noel or something. I don’t know if it’s a younger brother thing or what it is. The eldest always paves the way, isn’t that how it goes? He’s the first to look to go to the disco, he’s the first to look to go away off to the concert on the bus and so when the younger one asks, the ice is broken, isn’t it?
“Maybe it’s a bit like that with John because he seems to me to have more of an edge to him. He’s more aggressive. You see him sometimes when he beats a foul but the ref doesn’t give him an advantage and he comes back raging at the ref, saying he was through for a goal. He’s mad for goals, he’s mad to beat his man. There’s a real thrust about him.”
About him, about all of them. Ryan has created a new team in the space of 12 months and made it in his own image. Tough, unyielding, physical. Tipp.
The truth, of course, is that may or may not get the job done. Hand out a heap of debuts and you get to August with a handful of players turning out for the first championship experience of Croke Park. There’s no guarantee it will continue to go as smoothly as we’ve seen so far.
However it works out, at least Ryan can say he was his own man. That takes gumption, whatever the result.
