There he goes, the man who changed hurling history
Right after half-time, Brendan Maher of Tipperary soloed out of defence and performed a trick beloved of schoolboys everywhere: he flipped the ball over a Kilkenny man’s head, straight off the bas of his hurley, killing it as it came down on the far side of his opponent.
When he hit the ball upfield, Kilkenny’s Tommy Walsh responded with a sumptuous outlet ball to Jackie Tyrrell, hitting the sliotar down into the ground to take the pace off it.
Within a minute JJ Delaney had come onto a hopping ball and flicked it up to himself on the Hogan Stand side; TJ Reid cut the ball over the bar from a sideline. A minute after that Tipp’s Shane McGrath contrived an outrageous backhanded pick-up in his own half-back line.
Factor in the lack of space and time available yesterday in Jones’ Road and you realise this standard of hurling wasn’t just heavenly. It was ambrosial.
Last year’s epic was one of those once-in-a-generation games, and a friend of this column was chatting to an Australian visitor not long afterwards. The man from Down Under said Tipp-Kilkenny in September ‘09 was his first hurling game.
‘‘I was going to tell him not to bother going to any more,’’ said our pal. ‘‘He wouldn’t see better than that.’’
Yesterday ranks with last September. Praise enough.
Eventually we caught up with the man who left Croke Park with the match ball, metaphorically speaking.
Invited to celebrate three goals in an All-Ireland final, Lar Corbett wasn’t self-effacing. He was self-erasing.
“The win, it’s all about the win – there’s no good coming up here scoring three goals and going home a losing team. It’s all about the win.
“It’s unbelievable – it’s the whole year wrapped up in one 70 minutes.”
With due respect to Lar’s modesty, we were looking for a blow-by-blow. The Thurles Sars man relented.
Number one? “The high one came in and it was great to catch it, but look at the second one.
“Noel McGrath’s handpass was unbelievable. He had the ball and could have taken a handy score but saw the runner, backed him one on one with the keeper.
“Look at the third goal – ‘Bonnar’ Maher was on the flat of his back on the edge of the square and could have held onto it and been caught for over-carrying, but no: he got up and gave the handpass out.”
Gone again, back to the collective. You’d see more self-glorying individuality at a North Korean party conference, but it’s the point Corbett is keen to make.
“That’s what Tipperary have been building on. It doesn’t matter who gets the scores – put in the workrate. That’s the way we’ve been working for the last number of years and it’s great to be involved in a panel like that.
“What we have now in Tipperary is a panel. The subs that came on – Seamus Callanan came on, two scores; Seamus Hennessy, score; Benny Dunne, score. There’s four points in a few minutes.
“There’s no point in having 15, if you don’t have a panel you don’t have anything. There are 11 players who didn’t tog out.
“The other thing is composure in Croke Park – it’s no good having composure in Páirc Ui Chaoimh or Thurles, and where it started was the second half of the Galway game, when the subs came on – Pa Bourke, Seamie Callanan and Conor O’Brien.
“They came on and changed the game around. That’s when we got the belief in the panel.”
You try to steer the conversation back to the goals. He sees your plan and grabs the wheel.
“When you play Kilkenny you have to have goals on your mind,” Corbett says. “In the other dressing-room, what do they have in their minds? Goals. There’s no good in us saying we’ll take the points if they come out and rattle in two or three goals, which they do day in day out.
“(Selector) Eamonn O’Shea said there were goals in this team. You’ve to take on Kilkenny but we got the rub of the green, the few breaks we didn’t get last year. Thank God we got them.”
Surely when he blew the raindrops off the net with the third goal he felt it was over?
“I’ll never again think I have something until the ref blows the whistle. We spoke about it last week, that for two minutes in the second half last year we felt, ‘do we have it?’ – the biggest mistake you make in hurling.
“I’ll never make that mistake again and Paul Curran mentioned it during the week. It hit home to us and with Kilkenny especially, they’re the best in the business at getting goals out of nothing.”
Even the criticism he and his team-mates shipped after the Cork loss dissipated, given the power of the group.
“I enjoy listening to criticism. Really. I don’t like being praised too much because there’s only one place to go, and that’s down.
“We’ll take the criticism but you’ve to remember that’s just another person’s opinion. The panel and management must be tight-knit, we’ll work it out if things go wrong, and criticism has no effect on the day of a match.”
It had little enough effect yesterday. And then Lar Corbett is gone. Off to meet his team-mates. Off to his new life, a future of having people look after him on the street in Thurles, saying, look, there goes the man who scored three goals in an All-Ireland senior hurling final.
