Facing old rivals on the front line

FOR years the Kilkenny-Tipperary rivalry lay idle, softened by the few intermittent meetings that the passing summers deemed fit to bestow, but the Fenians club experienced its resurrection first-hand this time last year.

The club’s grounds in Johnstown lie less than 5km from the Munster county’s border and one day the locals awoke to find the legend ‘Up Tipp’ scrawled across the grey expanse of the perimeter wall.

For club chairman James Tobin, it was his first real introduction to a relationship that once consumed the minds of elder generations as the counties prepared to square up in an All-Ireland final for the first time since 1991.