THE TIPPERARY FOOTBALLERS have been a breath of fresh air to the championship in 2016.
They play a fearless brand of attacking football, have a refreshingly relaxed attitude towards the media and detest the notion of a drinking ban.
In the modern game, Liam Kearns is a rarity. After Tipperary defeated Galway in the All-Ireland quarter-final, he said his players were free to enjoy a few drinks and celebrate as a team.
Kearns was surprised at the reaction it received.
“I find that funny and it’s strange,” he says. “I want them to celebrate after a game and I want them to, and I feel there is a psychological advantage of doing it is way more, you can’t quantify it actually.
“Every team does it. Every team after a championship match would have a few drinks and I think one of the Tyrone players, I think Tiernan McCann, said they do. I heard Paul Galvin talking about it. Paul had an interesting version of it, Black Magic he called it.
“I would say every team does it and I want my team to do it because I think it has gone too serious, there is too much, they are being told what to eat, they are being told what to drink, they are being told what time they can go out at night.
“I think they are being treated as semi-professionals. The media now is huge and I just don’t want the fun going out of it. I want them to enjoy it and that’s our philosophy and that’s where is comes from.”
This is Tipperary side who play with a certain abandon that has almost become absent in the inter-county game. Kearns clearly hits the right note with his players and doesn’t put pressure on them to perform.
“Our mantra all year has been to go out and produce our best performance and we have done that in every game, bar the Kerry game.
“If we produce our best performance [on Sunday], I will be happy with that, regardless of what the result brings.
“We started in Division 3, we started with nobody giving us a chance against Cork and now we are in an All-Ireland semi-final, trying to beat the three best teams in the country so it has been a steep learning curve.
” Mayo are six times in an All-Ireland semi-final, Dublin are seven times, Kerry are four, they’re the top three teams in the country for the last number of years.
“We’re a Division 3 team that have come from nowhere so I can’t argue with that. But the only thing I will say is it was the same against Cork, Derry and Galway.
“We were underdogs in all of those – for the Cork game they were 1-5 and we were 5-1. Something similar for this game and we’re happy enough with that, we don’t have a problem with it.”
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