Colm Cooper ‘held huge fear factor’, says Michael Quinlivan

All-Star Tipperary full-forward Michael Quinlivan has revealed that Colm Cooper was always the first Kerry player they planned for and jokingly described the retired icon’s unique ability as “disgusting”.

Quinlivan, who’ll be in Allianz Football League Division 3 final action for Tipp this weekend, admitted that he watched a highlights reel of Cooper’s goals from his 14 years with Kerry following the ‘Gooch’s’ retirement announcement on Tuesday.

“He held a huge fear factor,” said Quinlivan.

“I never sat down in a team talk before playing against Kerry where he wasn’t the first name you talked about, about how to nullify his threat.

“He’ll be sorely missed, very sorely missed. I watched the highlights of his goals and some of them are just incredible. It’s actually disgusting.

“The Kerry team of the noughties was the team I grew up watching and their battles with Tyrone.

“One of my favourite goals is the one against Mayo where he plucks it from out over his head, throws three dummies and just taps it into the net. You’re just going: ‘Stop, like!’

“It’s great that he will stay playing on with the Crokes. They have to try to defend an All-Ireland club title this year so maybe we might get to play him again.”

Quinlivan’s immediate focus is on helping Tipp to claim a piece of silverware at Croke Park on Saturday evening.

They play Louth and it would be another excellent time to perform one of his infamous smash and grab raids.

The third of his three goals in last weekend’s Round 7 win over Armagh sealed victory and clinched promotion with just six seconds of injury-time remaining.

It was akin to his goal for Clonmel Commercials which came two minutes into injury-time of the 2015 Munster club final with Nemo Rangers and sealed the win that day too.

Quinlivan was also part of the Tipp minor side that broke Dublin’s hearts in the 2011 All-Ireland minor final with a late goal from Colman Kennedy at Croke Park.

“There was the game against Newcastlewest too, before the Nemo one. We kicked six points in four minutes to win that one by a point or two,” recalled Quinlivan.

“We just don’t tend to do things the easy way, I don’t know what it is.

“Maybe it’s that we feel under pressure to perform and maybe we have to go so far behind that maybe we feel the pressure is off ourselves then. “I met my Dad after the Armagh game and I was like: ‘Jeez, we need to stop doing this’. But he was like: ‘No, you don’t!’

“I suppose if we can have that sort of a tag that we are never gone or a game is never too far gone then isn’t that great?

“We’ve given some great excitement to a lot of people over the years and hopefully we can do it again in the future.”

Quinlivan, just the second player to win a football All-Star while playing for Tipperary, said gaining promotion has maintained the momentum in the county generated by last year’s unlikely march to the All-Ireland semi-finals.

“Maybe in some peoples’ eyes there would have been a small couple of question marks about a bit of luck and that maybe we caught people on the hop last year, that sort of thing,” said Quinlivan.

“Personally, I think what we do in the championship will be what we are truly graded on anyway. What we want to do in the championship, I don’t think anyone will set their sights on replicating what we did last year because that is a very tough thing to do again, but maybe to go somewhere close to it would be a way of validating what happened last year.”

Quinlivan shrugged when asked if he felt Tipperary would have reached the last four of the championship last year had the ‘Super 8’ format, which kicks in from 2018, been in place, ensuring they’d have had to play three top teams at what is currently the All-Ireland quarter-final stage.

“Who would we have played, let’s just say Galway, Mayo and Tyrone, I think it would have been something like that. I’ll let that answer your question.”