Eimear Ryan: I felt a little imposter syndrome jumping on the Tipperary football bandwagon
Tipperary players celebrate after the Munster GAA Football Senior Championship Final match between Cork and Tipperary at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
It was a strange weekend to be a Tipp supporter. A joyful one, though not quite in the way we might have anticipated.
On Saturday, it looked like we might grind out one of those hardworking hurling wins that is typical of latter-day Tipp, full of the type of graft and work ethic that Liam Sheedy, Eamon O’Shea, and Michael Ryan have instilled in this group of players over the last decade or so.
On paper, it’s hard to fault the performance. Tipp had a spread of 13 different scorers. Workhorses Dan McCormack and Bonner Maher — neither especially noted for their firepower — popped up for crucial scores. Noel McGrath hit four from play, including one in the fifth minute, which on a different day, he might have finessed into a goal.
Seamie Callanan looked to be in vintage form, poaching a goal at the outset and scoring a quintessential Callanan point in the second half: latching onto the ball with his back to goal, looping around his marker and striking over his shoulder. Having the option to bring on the likes of John McGrath and the industrious Willie Connors for the last 20 minutes, Tipp looked well placed to close it out.
In the final quarter, though Tipp harried and chased, Galway kept calm and kept their heads above water. Cathal Mannion and Brian Concannon were magnetic up front with an almost uncanny read of one another. Joe executed his placed balls flawlessly.
Galway’s mental strength in picking themselves up from the Leinster final deserves high praise.
The Tipp hurlers have a taste of that now.
It’s even hard to tell if the sending off was a turning point. Part of me thought that Tipp would tough it out against the odds, as they did against Wexford in the All-Ireland semi-final last year, when John McGrath was second-yellowed at around the same stage of the game.
Cathal Barrett will rightly feel aggrieved at his first yellow in particular, and again, the lack of consistency in refereeing decisions is frustrating; stupid on-the-ball slaps happen all the time and don’t get cards. (My heart was in my mouth any time that Jake Morris or Ronan Maher fouled a player in the second half, and indeed it’s hard to see why Barrett was singled out among them.)
That said, I’m not sure Liam Sheedy’s post-match comment that the game should have been overseen by a Leinster ref makes much sense. (He’s hardly suggesting that a ref from Kilkenny, for example, would have been more appropriate.) Ideally, from quarter-final stage onwards, refs should be drawn from counties no longer in the championship, but Johnny Murphy’s performance was solid overall. The decisions against Tipp last Saturday were very much within the normal spectrum of a game’s ups and downs.
Speaking of ups and downs: the Munster football final was the unexpected gift we never knew we needed.
For once, when the football was featured first on The Sunday Game, I did not sigh. It’s astonishing that the big ball managed to outshine the small on a weekend when the two All-Ireland hurling qualifiers yielded 11 goals between them, many of them dazzling, with two of them scored by backs — Clare’s Aidan McCarthy and Galway’s Aidan Harte — Trojan-horsing their way up the pitch to rattle the net.
If the winter championship started off a bit tentative, it’s now amped up to 11. All this was still not enough to earn top billing, not this time.
I have to admit that football has never before given me occasion to jump around the kitchen screaming. I’m a hurling person to an almost blinkered degree: I watch ladies football and the business end of the men’s championship, but that’s about it. I don’t have much of a stake in the game.
It’s been so easy in recent years to be cynical about football in general, when the ultimate outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion; when the playing field is far from level, and the greatest set-up in the game, wonderful as they are to watch, seem to pride themselves on their lack of emotion.
In contrast, it was impossible not to be moved by the joy of the Tipp footballers on Sunday — not just in the aftermath, but throughout. (Think Michael Quinlivan’s grin after his last point just before the break.) I was thrilled while also conscious that it was nothing compared to what loyal Tipp football supporters must have felt.
There was a sense of imposter syndrome almost, of jumping on the bandwagon.
The 85-year famine. The Grangemockler jerseys with the ghostly watermark of Michael Hogan’s face on the sleeves. The disallowed goal that in another year would have been the subject of many wistful ‘what ifs’. Colm O’Rouke extolling Tipp’s old-fashioned style of play, sounding pleasantly surprised, as if he no longer expects to have nice things happen in his line of work.
All the wholesome masculinity on display afterwards — huge men crying and hugging each other. If you read this scenario in a novel or saw it in an inspirational sports movie, you’d think they were laying it on a bit thick; the fact that it’s real is what makes it transcendent.
The win will surely serve as motivation and inspiration for Tipp’s camogie players, lining out in an All-Ireland semi-final on Saturday afternoon as underdogs against the champions, Galway.
There are certain parallels with the Tipp footballers: the camogie team has a nice balance of youth and experience, is unbeaten so far this year, and simmering with a quiet confidence. If the footballers had huge impact from Colin O’Riordan’s return to the fold, the camogie players have LGFA star Aishling Moloney available for selection.
Two Tipp teams in the All-Ireland semi-finals, and neither of them the hurlers? It wasn’t on our 2020 bingo cards, but we’d gladly take it.
