The ballad of Reading’s Gael

Shane Long might have been winning an All Ireland medal for Tipp but instead he was winning man of the match plaudits for his country. At the end of a momentous year, on and off the pitch, the Reading and Ireland striker tells his story to Liam Mackey

WHEN Stephen Hunt recently described Shane Long as a “Tipperary hurler”, he was paying the highest kind of compliment to the combination of steel and style with which the Reading striker had just forged his strongest run of form yet in the green shirt of Ireland.

But Hunt, a former colleague of Long’s at Reading, was also only speaking the plain truth. For Shane Long is the guy who could have been an All-Ireland medal winner with Tipp but who chose instead, at a critical point in his young life and sporting development, to walk away from a promising hurling career and try his luck at football instead.