By John Harrington
From the high of winning a first provincial football title for 85 years in 2020, the fortunes of the Tipperary senior footballers have been on a steady downward slide since then.
This year they were relegated to Division 4 of the League, beaten by Kerry by 20 points in the Munster SFC semi-final, and then last weekend fell to Meath in Round 1 of the Tailteann Cup.
It’s been a challenging time, but team-captain Steven O’Brien says the position the Premier County currently find themselves in is an understandable one considering the talent drain that has depleted their resources.
“It’s no secret,” he says. “From our panel in 2020, we’ve lost over 20 players from that. If you were take 20 players off Dublin, Kerry, Mayo, Galway – they’d be under pressure too. So we’re in a bit of a rebuild at the moment.
“But that doesn’t take away from the effort the lads are putting in who are there now. You see them every night at training. They’re really getting after it.
“And it’s not just numbers we’ve lost, it’s key players. Quinlivan, Sweeney, Conor Sweeney. Alan Campbell and Bill Maher are in America.
“All those lads would start for any county team. It’s hard to replace that calibre of player. Like I said, there are some good young players there now.
“But it probably was to be expected when you lose the calibre of player. But we’re getting back after it and hopefully we can drive on again now through the Tailteann Cup.
“It’s just going to take a bit of time. But because of the bodies we’ve lost, we’re back down in Division 4 and we’re in the Tailteann Cup. That’s probably where we are the moment. That’s just being realistic.”
Three years on from that historic win over Cork in the 2020 Munster SFC Final, and O’Brien’s memories of the day remain vivid.
It was a day weighted with emotion for Tipperary before a ball was even kicked because it was the anniversary weekend of Bloody Sunday when one of their own, Mick Hogan, was murdered by Crown forces in Croke Park.
To mark the occasion the Tipperary players wore the same white and green-hooped jerseys that their forebears had worn on that fateful day 100 years ago, and on the sleeves of those jersies was an image of Mick Hogan himself.
Rather than be weighted down by history, the Tipperary players seemed inspired by it. The only regret was that so few people were there to see them win it, because the game was played in an empty Páirc Úí Chaoimh due to Covid restrictions.
“There was a lot of distractions, with the Bloody Sunday jersey and that,” says O’Brien.
“But in fairness to Conor Sweeney and David Power, they nipped that in the bud. The question came up would we wear the jersey and we decided we’d go for it.
“But we actually brought the jersey to training a couple of weeks beforehand. So we’d worn it, we’d seen the jersey. So when we got down to Cork, it wasn’t new to us.
“So we dealt with those distractions. We parked them early. But the day itself was very surreal. You’re playing a Munster final in front of the subs. You can hear yourself talk, you can hear yourself think.
“The Munster final is something you’ve been dreaming of since the first time you put on a Tipperary jersey. And it was lovely, just us in dressing room after.
“But when the dust settles, you’re hoping you see Mam or Dad in the car after. But then you tog out and you drive home on your own in the car.
“It was very surreal. Leaving Páirc Uí Chaoimh having achieved this great thing. But you’re driving home on your own.”
“We went back to Conor Sweeney’s club. It’s just on the border of Tipp and Cork so it was fitting enough that it was there. There was bonfires as we were driving in, there was people out on the street clapping us as we were going through.
“It was lovely to see. But it was different.”
It mightn’t have been won to the backdrop he would ideally have liked, but O’Brien still takes huge satisfaction from that 2020 provincial win.
“There’s been plenty of Tipp of footballers better than I was, who carried the Tipp flag for a long time, who don’t have a Munster medal,” he says. 2So it’s something personally I’m incredible proud of.
“A lot of work went into it. We got the medals but there was a lot of work went into the years leading up to it.
“We would have felt we were knocking on the door since 2014, putting in some big performances. We’re delighted to have the medals in the back pocket but we’re not unaware of the work that went before us.”
The senior county team’s fortunes might be at a lower ebb now than they were in 2020, but O’Brien is still optimistic about the future.
Tipperary will most likely always be a hurling county first and foremost, but football is growing in popularity in parts of it where it previously had little purchase.
O’Brien’s own club, Ballina, are a perfect case in point, which is why he thinks Tipperary football can continue to grow in the coming years.
“Where I’m from in Tipp is predominantly hurling,” he says. “North Tipperary, it’s all hurling. Now we’ve gone after football in our own club and we’ve had some great successes. We went from Junior to Intermediate to Senior in the last few years.
“And when you look back, four years ago we didn’t even have a football team. So we’ve put emphasis into football ourselves.
“From a county board perspective, they are trying to promote football as much as they are hurling.”