Cunningham: Tough games caught up with us, but there is tremendous talent here

"Sport is a cruel master." Those were the words from Tipperary manager Eamon O’Shea after Saturday evening’s win over Galway, but he was referring particularly to his counterpart in maroon, Anthony Cunningham.

“It is cruel,” Anthony agreed. “You wouldn’t have seen that finish with 20 minutes to go, five points up [six actually!]. We got a tremendous performance out of our guys but I think we tired badly in the last 15 minutes. Tipp finished stronger, got some very good scores. We can’t say a thing about the performance, they threw everything at this game. It was a tremendous battle but we’ve had a tough few weeks with matches.”

Tough wouldn’t begin to describe it. Draw and a replay loss to Kilkenny, then drawn against Tipperary away a week later, a driven, highly-motivated and still ultra-talented Tipperary. “Absolutely, yes, they’re a tremendous team, tremendous skill and hurlers here. To come down to Thurles any time is difficult. We’ve had to play those three games in two weeks, probably the toughest draw of any we could get.”

Still, disappointing as it is, Galway have made progress this season.

“Even compared to last year we’re much happier with our performances. We had a good year, a very solid league; to finish this evening is disappointing really, very disappointing for the lads because they’ve thrown everything at this.

“You’ll probably hear all the experts now of what went wrong, what was right, but I know and my backroom team know and all the players know, they’ll live to fight another day, that’s for sure.

“We had a tremendous performance against Kilkenny in the drawn game. There wasn’t a whole pile wrong last weekend, and tonight, there’d have been a lot of people very happy with about 20 minutes to go, five [six!] points up.

“We wouldn’t be very happy that we didn’t kill off the game but there’s tremendous talent there. Any team that can live with the top two teams that are there in Kilkenny and Tipperary, at that level, there’s huge promise there.

“ The performance was there, they’re thriving really. In particular we had five or six new players this year who hadn’t played championship before. We’re in a building process, happy with that though not happy with the result. We were very, very close.”

As for his own future,staying on?

“Absolutely. We love what we’re doing but that’s for another day. You have to stand back and credit hurlers this evening.”