'What can we do?': Liam Cahill believes Tipperary played 'in fear' in loss to Clare

“You can live with one or two, three players maybe going bad at a particular time or struggling,” said Cahill. “You'll do your best to manoeuvre and fix it on the line.

“I don't want to make it any worse than it already is but with the exception of maybe Robert Doyle and Bryan O'Mara today, where else would you go to say that the rest of the players were up to a level that they'd be happy with themselves?

“You can only bring in five subs and to be fair, I'm not keeping all the blame here at the players' feet either. I'm genuinely not but I know that I can speak freely enough because they know me well enough to say that.

“They know when seven or eight players or nine players go away at the one time, numbers on the scoreboard happen like what happened outside. Unfortunately, this particular group have a history of doing this and we know that and we try to address it.

“We go about it really well on the hurling field and the training field and hope that we bring it to the match day. When we start hurling in fear with not being able to hurl that ball out and putting our hand out looking for it and making sure that we're giving options to the men and the ball. When we don't do that, we're a really moderate team.

“It's just a real Jekyll and Hyde performance versus this time last year. What can we do? We'll try our best to go after it and fix it and hopefully come up with something better over the next seven days.”

Cahill didn’t sense such a malfunction in the three-week lead-up to the game.

“The players put in huge effort, lads. We have prepared really well. I think all of our players will put their hand up and say that.

“All our metrics, all our numbers are exactly where they need to be versus where they were this time last year. It's about bringing it to the big arena on the day and being prepared to put your body on the line.

"Today, physically, Clare really dominated. The swarm tackle, Clare were there in numbers. How many times did you see our guys trying to reach out to get a high-hand passing forward group of players all around them? They were hunting in packs. They smelled blood and they went after it.”

Tipperary’s exit might be confirmed before they face Limerick but a performance will be sought in TUS Gaelic Grounds.

“We just have to do our best to try and get in behind the lads as best we can for the next couple of days," said Cahill.

"Try and go to Limerick and really try and redeem our name and our identity of some sort because today it's really, really disappointing.”