Tipp dangermen lurking everywhere

WE had our quality introduction sitting in the back pocket for this one — the clash of sprezzatura and catenaccio, Tipp’s style and brio versus Waterford’s dogged intransigence.

It went in the shredder about four minutes into the game, or until Lar Corbett’s first goal yesterday.

After 47 minutes in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, the public address announcer started to give detailed information about the exits from the stadium.

Usually regarded as housekeeping instructions disregarded by the masses, yesterday they had the quality of merciful suggestion.

Tipperary-Waterford in the Munster final was unpleasant to watch yesterday if you were from Waterford, and in honesty even Tipperary people probably didn’t knock much craic out of it.

The scoreline with a minute left was like an 80s pop band — 7-17 — but Pa and Shane Bourke spoiled our backup intro with two late points. 7-19, the kind of scoreline you get in a mismatch between Under-12 teams who can get the ball into the air but barely over the bar.

The record books will show that the tormentor in chief for Tipperary was Lar Corbett with four goals, but that’s a matter of statistics.

The men in blue and gold dominated completely along their own half-back line and had an irresistible supply of ball going into the Waterford red zone, as evidenced by the score.

And it was as simple as that. By putting the sliotar in front of the Waterford goal Tipperary created chances every time they went upfield, it seemed.

After a week of shaping about who would or wouldn’t be at full-back for Waterford, speculation reminiscent of the jockeying for the Fine Gael presidential nomination, Déise boss Davy Fitzgerald had positioned his strongest defender, Michael ‘Brick’ Walsh guarding the square.

With the amount of ball coming in, he might as well have tried Gay Mitchell. By half-time it was 5-10 to eight points, and when Lar Corbett broke a hurley on the resumption you half-expected a curator from the National Museum to come on and preserve the splinters in a glass case. It wasn’t one-sided. It was none-sided.

“Every team that was playing this year, they started out in the championship wanting to go through the front door,” said Tipp boss Declan Ryan afterwards.

“Tipperary were no different in that regard.

“I’m just delighted for our backroom team and the players, who have put in a huge effort to get themselves to the level they were at today. Five weeks to an All-Ireland semi-final now, and we know we have a bit of work to do to keep the feet on the ground. It’s new territory for Tipp in a lot of ways: to score that many goals, there is going to be a certain amount of talk, but we have a lot to look forward to. There is going to be a certain amount of club games thrown in there as well. I’m sure there will be plenty of hype after today’s performance but we’re lucky; I think we have a lot of experienced players in the group and a lot of the younger guys are used to winning. The job will be to perform at our optimum level the next day we go out as well. ”

The shell-shocked and the dazzled among us yesterday were calling for consolidation of the championship, to let Tipperary and Kilkenny have a go at each other rather than putting them through the trivialities of semi-finals.

On the basis of the beatings handed out to the two defeated provincial finalists, you’d say that perhaps Galway are the only ones now in a position to offer resistance to those two.

Dublin and now Waterford have it all to do to get themselves right mentally for their next outing.

“It is very hard to take,” said an understandably subdued Davy Fitzgerald afterwards. “We are all gutted. We are not as bad as that. If Tipp get two or three goals on you and smell blood then they will finish you. That is what they did.

“I am going to keep that (what he said to the players) to myself. We are under no illusions as to what we have to do and we are not going to throw in the towel that easy.”

What did Tipp learn from yesterday? Not a whole lot. They conceded a few frees too many but the rehearsed spontaneity of their forward movement — sprezzatura, as we said above — remains a joy to watch.

Significantly, Brendan Maher also returned from injury yesterday, which may prove more important in the long run than their goal tally.

Waterford? In the latest instalment of his memoirs, Alistair Campbell muses one of the big challenges of government — getting the correct balance between the urgent and the important. The Déise’s next outing against Galway combines both.