Maher won’t let one blip mar rest of the season

By the time Brendan Maher left the Gaelic Grounds last Sunday, he had moved on. After that weighty loss to Limerick, Liam Sheedy gave him and the other Tipperary players a couple of evenings off to decompress before returning to training but he was already thinking of an All-Ireland quarter-final.

Now 30, the 2016 All-Ireland winning captain is more philosophical about his hurling but a series of deaths in his locality in 2019 including that of Amanda Stapleton, sister of his friend and former county team-mate Paddy, have helped him keep his sporting disappointments in check.