A back seat but Shanahan still on watch
Tipp-Waterford was on Setanta, after all.
Then a familiar figure loomed out of the darkness.
“Well,” said Dan Shanahan, offering the perennial conversation-opener of the Waterford male as he sat down, “I see the county board got decent track suits for the lads as soon as I retired. Typical.”
The last time Dan Shanahan was in Semple Stadium was a Saturday night as well. It was the replayed Munster hurling final between Waterford and Cork last summer, a game that edged into extra time with little between the sides.
Then Shanahan had come on and beat Donal Óg Cusack from 20 metres for the winning goal.
It was a fine farewell to Thurles, but now he was back.
“This is the first Waterford game I’ve been to since retiring,” he said.
“Miss it? I don’t miss the pre-season stuff, slogging your guts out, staying in most weekend nights or going away training on Saturday and Sunday. You get enough of that after 13, 14 years.
“It’s not as if I’m not training. We’re plugging away with Lismore, and I got into mixed martial arts training in Cappoquin, with Ross Barrett — training, not fighting — so I’m ticking over.
“But now I’m here, and the game is going to start...”
The teams were walking into their positions on the pitch. Shaking hands. Getting ready.
“You’d miss this alright.”
For the purposes of the column, it would be wonderful to report that Shanahan gripped the sides of his seat until his knuckles whitened as he hit every ball in sympathy with his one-time teammates, but that wasn’t the case.
The technicalities of the game were more pressing.
“The lads are playing a more traditional formation,” he pointed out. “Seamus (Prendergast) is sticking in full-forward, but he has Eamonn Murphy and Maurice (Shanahan) alongside of him for the breaks. Now, that’s a nice one coming in...”
Shane O’Sullivan had dropped a high ball in on Prendergast and his marker, Paul Curran, and Shanahan hummed in approval: he put down almost a decade and a half in a white and blue jersey, awaiting that kind of choice delivery.
On this occasion the ball broke from Prendergast and Curran and Tipperary cleared.
“You’d be surprised sometimes by the lights,” said Shanahan. “I’d say in Gaelic football you’d get used to it fairly quickly, but in hurling you’d lose the sliotar in the lights the odd time, though I know they’re supposed to be angled so the players don’t look directly into them.
“What I found sometimes was the shadows would put you off; if the ball was on the ground the fact that there were so many shadows from so many different angles might catch you.
“Well, that was the excuse I used to try, anyway. Hey, isn’t that Liam Sheedy over there?”
It certainly looked like the former Tipp manager, swaddled in a beanie cap like most of those in attendance; if it was him he was taking copious notes, unlike most of the others in the stand.
The game rolled on.
Waterford conceded a loose goal and with Noel McGrath ghosting around the field to direct the play, Tipperary were relatively comfortable at the break, five points ahead.
Plenty of Waterford supporters in the stand had saluted Shanahan or said hello, and two kids in blue-and-white tops three rows in front clearly spent the first half working up the courage to approach their hero.
The Déise fan in front of us turned around and bemoaned the lack of a direct approach from his side, but without bitterness. It was the league. To be precise, the first week of March.
“This is a side of it you wouldn’t see,” said Shanahan.
“When you’re playing, even if you don’t line out in a league game, you’re there on the sideline, or if you’re injured you’re probably getting rehab. Then in the summer it’s death or glory.
“You’d forget there are evenings like this, that people can just come along and enjoy it and chat without getting too worked up.”
Soon after the break, Waterford had Shane O’Sullivan and Clinton Hennessy sent off, and the game deflated as a contest.
Tipp didn’t kick on with the two-man advantage, and Waterford could take some comfort from their rearguard action; though Tipp menaced the Déise goal on occasion, they didn’t raise another green flag.
Once, when Patrick Maher broke through a knot of players near the Waterford 21, someone nearby wondered aloud how he’d come out with the ball.
Shanahan’s eye was still in: “Noel McGrath broke it for him with a flick back through his legs.
“I don’t know if Pa Bourke meant to leave the first ball through his legs, but Noel meant that one, definitely. Classy.”
At the end, everybody was filing down the Semple steps to head home, when I asked Shanahan if he would be calling into the dressing room to say hello to his old friends.
“No,” he said. “You have to leave them to it. When you’re gone, you’re gone.”
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
