How much pressure did ‘drive for five’ put on the Cats last year?

EVERYONE is fixated on the similarities between this year’s final and the previous two.

What about the differences? There’s one significant change. Kilkenny are no longer bearing the burden of hunting consecutive All-Irelands. Though Brian Cody and company protested otherwise, the ‘drive for five’ of last year took a toll. Even their opponents admit that.

“I think this year it is going to take a bigger push to beat Kilkenny because they don’t have that weight of history on their shoulders,” says Tipperary goalkeeper Brendan Cummins.

“They have a full strength team, they don’t have the injuries this year, they have nothing like the distractions, I suppose they would call them, and they have had a good lead-up to it with those wins over Waterford and Dublin.”

Cummins has the facts and figures to back up his assertion about the pressure on Kilkenny last year.

“Sure there was bound to be (pressure). There was something like 12,000 or 13,000 people watching them training — you know in all fairness, if Manchester United opened Old Trafford they might not get that many.

“It is huge pressure on amateurs and it was pressure I suppose that they had brought on themselves with their success. Tipp players have seen that in the past 12 months, the kind of hype that is around after winning an All-Ireland, and we only won one, so you can imagine what it is like after winning four-in-a-row and the prospect of five and the pressure that brings.

Cummins makes a neat comparison between the Kilkenny training session and Tipp’s low-key preparations.

“When I heard about it, I looked around the stands in Thurles and there was nobody in, and I thought, ‘this is the best way to prepare’.

“You want to try and keep it as low-key as possible when you are going into these type of games. The world of expectation was on Kilkenny because they were so successful and I suppose that is par for the course. We had been building for three years to get to that moment and it all just clicked on the day.”

Cummins was on Noreside for that session; then again, he usually is on weekdays between nine and five.

“I work in Kilkenny, I would hear that there were crowds at Nowlan Park. Customers came in and were going, ‘Jaysus, I could not get into see the training the other night because the place was mobbed.’ “So I was going up to Thurles and in fairness to Tipperary people, there wasn’t that much hysteria.

“You also would not have people coming from outside the county to watch you like they would in Kilkenny, where you would have people travelling down from the north.”

Kilkenny in better nick for Sunday, then. Seconds out for round three.