IN THE calm after the storm, it was asked of Tipperary manager Liam Sheedy what he made of his team’s performance in the second half? “Well they’ve no regard for my heart at all,” he said, and then took another deep breath.
It was one of those afternoons. You think you’re coasting. You look up at the scoreboard. You think you’re home. Then you look up at the scoreboard again and wonder what on earth is going on here. “Yeah, I looked up at the scoreboard and we’re up, 17 points to 7 or something, and hurling well within ourselves,” added Sheedy. “Then Clare hit 1-1. We talked at half-time, said there was more in us again, but full credit to Clare.
“They were really on top the last 20 minutes, and I don’t think anyone could have argued with a draw at the end of it. They hurled themselves back into, came absolutely roaring at us, and we were hanging on at the end.
“Munster hurling is still typically puck-of-the-ball stuff. And that’s what we’ve seen again today. Sure, it’s an area to work on. We did have big leads and struggled to put away teams. But that’s where we’re at, in June. We’re building, and you’d have to say as well that some of the quality of play out there was absolutely top notch. It’s all about getting the consistency now. We know that.
“So we’ll draw on the positives, because today, like the Cork game, the tide was against us the last 10 minutes, and each time the character of the team came up trumps. So it is mission accomplished for us.”
Midfielder James Woodlock agreed. Tipp came to the Gaelic Grounds for one reason only: “We’re into a Munster final and that was our only ambition coming down here today. It was always going to be a very physical match. We didn’t expect anything less. We had it all to lose. So they threw everything at us. We had it all to do to come out in the end by three points, or whatever it was. It was just their sheer intensity that brought them back into it.”
The issue of Tipp’s tendency to doze off was a question of either/or for Woodlock: “A bad second half for us? Or a good second half from the opposing team? I mean, we’re working on that all the time, what you might call a lull on the game. Every team has its purple patch. But when they got on top of us we still ground it out, hooking and blocking. That’s our game. We’ll move on now.”
Defeat for Clare was not without its rewards: “Well we could have come away with the draw,” said captain Brian O’Connell, “but we’ve been knocked in our own county, our heart questioned, and that was all we wanted out of today, really. To prove that we have heart, and love playing for Clare. We tried to answer that today.”
Clare manager Mike McNamara also spoke about that sense of inner satisfaction: “It’s important that you have the public on your side, and in the last quarter of the game you’d imagine there were 25,000 of them there. To have them back on board is certainly a bonus. But to lose in a Munster championship match is always bitterly disappointing, and hurtful, because this is the second year in a row we played against Tipp, and felt we didn’t as play as well as we could. We did in patches, and in spurts, but in the first half they were way ahead of us.
“But we’re finding people, like Colin Ryan. We must be finding people like that all the time. And we’ve more to find, in order to get a team that will contest Munster championships, and All-Ireland finals. We do have to get this team right, and it may take a little more time, with a little more pain along the way.”
