The stories are endless.
Whether it is Paul Galvin explaining why Kerry always felt a need to give them a bloody nose, John Evans standing agog as a 15-year-old Colin O’Riordan tells his minor team-mates he has no intention of losing to Cork or Kerry for a first time or Clonmel’s Michael Quinlivan striking late to hand Clonmel a last gasp Munster final win over giants Nemo Rangers.
Tipperary football folk are hard as f**k… So why did anyone think Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final would show us anything else?
Division 3 versus Division 1… The county outside the last-four since before WWII versus the perennial semi-finalists… Number 2 in their own county versus one of the best supported teams in Ireland.
Blah, blah, blah.
All that is external, or historical, or incidental. To Liam Kearns and his motivated footballers it was all just white noise. They had earned their place opposite Mayo thanks to a shock win over Cork, a gutsy defeat of Derry and a dismantling of Galway – these were not some plucky underdogs who had lucked out to reach this stage through some quirk in the fixtures.
Tipperary's players 'never bent the knee', says proud manager Liam Kearns https://t.co/noghMSdY9S
— The Sunday Game (@TheSundayGame) August 21, 2016
This is an incredibly talented bunch of footballers who, in Conor Sweeney and Michael Quinlivan, boast two of the finest forwards in the country, a top-class midfielder in Peter Acheson and great defenders like Bill Maher.
Motivated, talented and hyped to high heavens to be on the second biggest stage of all, was it any wonder they came out of the blocks like a demon – racing into a 6-3 lead early on?
Far from “bending the knee’ they were looking to break Mayo’s will, however this Mayo team are made of sterner stuff than that and they came back with a quickfire 1-7 to lead 1-10 to 0-7 at the break.
Jesus, lads, Mayo are in the All-Ireland final again – show them some respect https://t.co/zMpr5QQ03V #GAA
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) August 21, 2016
A nine-point swing in your first All-Ireland semi-final since Amelia Earhart and Adolf Hitler were doing their respective things, you might be expected to curl up in the foetal position and wait for Mayo to fillet you like a fish.
Instead we have ‘The Sunday Game’ panel all but ruling out a Mayo win on September 18th because Tipperary won the second 35 minutes 0-7 to 1-3.
They may have lost the war, but to explain how they won that battle we need to reflect on where they are coming from. We need to remind ourselves that Tipperary football folk, while few in number, are hard as f**k.
This is the team who rightly stopped talking to Tipp FM back in 2007 after the local radio station ran a call-in show asking if Tipperary were “the worst football team in Ireland”.
This is the team who lost the guts of a team to the United States, Aussie Rules, injury, other commitments and the county hurlers over the course of the winter – they are also the team that got fed up talking about these departures as an excuse.
This is the team who failed to have club hurling matches postponed in the run-up to Sunday’s semi-final and had the farcical situation in March of an Allianz League match being fixed for three different venues in the space of a week.
Tipperary, Kildare and the mystery of the nomadic Allianz League match #GAA https://t.co/yyuBZiinwn
— GAA JOE (@GAA__JOE) March 22, 2016
So, when faced by a six-point deficit, Liam Kearns’ men are not going to panic. They battled back and, but for a narrow Hawk-Eye ruling on a Quinlivan effort, could have been within a single point of their lauded opponents.
They never gave up, they battled on. They battled after Acheson broke his hand midweek, they battled after Robbie Kiely’s early black card, they battled after Jason Doherty’s goal, they battled after Conor O’Shea’s goal and they battled after Maher’s unfair red card. They battled on until the final whistle.
That is what Tipperary football is all about. Battling.
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