Brendan Maher confident Tipp can refocus for Clare showdown

Shell-shocked would be an apt description to describe Tipperary’s post-match behaviour on Sunday. Michael Ryan delivered a dressing room speech only to realise afterwards that John McGrath was still on the field, for which the manager apologised.

After a meal with Tommy Dunne’s similarly-confused minor group who had earlier lost a 12-point second-half lead to Waterford, the seniors shot the breeze on the field in an empty Gaelic Grounds. If indignance defined their reaction to the comeback draw against Cork, what marked their response to this phoenix-from-the-flames recovery was indigestion.

Official man of the match Brendan Maher tried to make some sense of it. “With 10 minutes to go, you would have taken a draw maybe just to get some sort of result but a poor performance overall, I suppose. We’re depending on other results, which is not a nice way to be, but we just have to focus on winning next weekend. That’s a big one for us now and that’s as much as we can do.”