Tipp came to play a match; Cats to fight a war

THE difference between Tipperary and Kilkenny?

Brendan Cummins outlined what he saw as one of them at a Tipp pre-match press conference in the Horse and Jockey Hotel a couple of years ago.

Tipperary, he said with a silent sigh, won an All-Ireland, celebrated for the winter and cherished it; Kilkenny won an All-Ireland, celebrated for the winter and forgot all about it come the first of January. Tipperary dreamt of empires; Kilkenny went about attempting to build them.

There were differences between the pair on Sunday too, so many and so profound that the mystery was why the defending champions were so close at the final whistle (answer: the four-point turnaround that issued from Michael Fennelly’s failure to take his point followed by Pa Bourke’s goal at the other end).

Tipp went up to play a match; Kilkenny went up to fight a war. Kilkenny were supremely focused and savagely hungry; Tipp merely thought they were. The Kilkenny management, as befitted a trio of their experience, war-gamed the battle brilliantly; their Tipperary counterparts, understandably for a trio of their inexperience, were first-time directors who suddenly found themselves on the set of a Spielberg movie. Kilkenny were trained to the minute and superbly coached; Tipp – well, you get the drift.

“The day a forward isn’t working hard he loses his right to be on the team, it’s as simple as that — you’re there for the team. I don’t understand all this talk about tactics, to be honest about it – Jesus!” It was also a victory for clear-eyed thinking and constructive ball use.

Kilkenny may have been more direct and destructive when doing their Ride of the Valkyries stuff three years ago, but they never worked their way around the pitch as thoughtfully or stitched their moves together as precisely as they did on Sunday. All those 20- and 30-yard passes lasered off the stick to a colleague in space, all those crossfield balls from Tommy Walsh, even that reverse sweep by Henry Shefflin for Michael Rice’s point just before the interval.

Tipperary? At half-time they were instructed to stop going long because their bread and butter approach had been rendered futile by the Kilkenny defence, as it had been by Dublin three weeks earlier. Well might the favourites have in hindsight rued the sloppiness of Waterford’s defending in the Munster final. It was as though the seven-goal blast in Páirc Uí Chaoimh had seduced Tipp into believing any oul’ ball lamped indiscriminately into the heart of the opposition defence would set the tills ringing.

The case of Brendan Maher will have taught Declan Ryan that hard decisions come with the territory and the only place for one’s best players is on the field. Granted, Ryan was unlucky with the injuries to Maher and Seamus Hennessy, but it should go without saying that injuries are one of life’s inevitable evils. Kilkenny beat Cork in 2006 without JJ Delaney and Limerick the following year despite losing Noel Hickey and Henry Shefflin before half-time.

For the new champions it was a win that enshrined their four-in-a-row, for their victims a defeat that made the tiny footnote that accompanied last year’s back-door triumph a small asterisk. If Declan Ryan is looking for consolation he may find it in the fact the four in-a-row did not suddenly appear come about; it took Brian Cody ten years, many trials, a few errors and, crucially, the fruits of two separate under-age groups – the 1999 U21 team of Shefflin, Hickey and Brennan and the 2004-’06 U21 generation of Walsh, Larkin and Power – to accomplish it.

It is not being wise after the event to say that Tipperary were never going to achieve world domination on foundation of one group of minors, however talented.

Now Tipp, like the Tipp Ryan played with in 1989, need a second All-Ireland and they need it quickly. As for this Kilkenny team, frankly they need never win another match after last Sunday. They’ll celebrate till Christmas.

And then January will come.