THEY’LL HAVE TO get past Kerry and maybe Cork to do it but Tipperary’s Brian Fox has set his sights firmly on Munster senior football championship glory.
The Premier County haven’t ruled the roost in the province since 1935 but recent underage success has fuelled expectation of a major breakthrough at senior level.
Tipp went desperately close to shocking Cork in last summer’s semi-final at Páirc Uí Chaoimh but Aidan Walsh bailed the Rebels out of danger.
Now Kerry await Peter Creedon’s men in the last four of the 2015 series, with the Kingdom preparing for a visit to Semple Stadium on 14 June.
Kerry won the 2013 championship meeting between the counties by 17 points in Killarney but Tipp are confident that the gap has been closed.
Fox said: “We want to win a Munster championship and in order to win a Munster championship you have to beat Cork or Kerry at some stage. Why not this year?”
Tipp showed ominous form on Sunday, blitzing hapless Waterford by 22 points in Thurles.
And Fox, 26, admits that they could have done with a better standard of opposition ahead of the acid test against Kerry.
“I agree. I’m not saying you can only beat what is put in front of you, but we didn’t think the game would manifest itself like that.
“We honestly thought we were going to be in for a huge battle and we knew we had to put in a performance.
“We did perform, but we probably needed a stronger game, to be really challenged.
“I think Waterford will be disappointed with their own performance.
“Whenever we play Waterford we tend to struggle, be it league or whatever, we never beat them by much.
“It clicked for us and everything went wrong for them. They know that themselves.
“They’ll be very disappointed with the way they played.”
Just 1,641 spectators clicked through the turnstiles and while a bigger attendance is expected for the Kerry game, those are not the numbers that concern Fox.
“It won’t bother us. Whatever is here is here and they will support us to the last.
“That is what we want, the supporters who come out and support us. We don’t care what size the crowd is.
“We didn’t look beyond Waterford, but in the back of your mind you want to have a crack off Kerry.
“We are after giving ourselves the opportunity to have a crack off Kerry. That is all we wanted at the start of the year, but we knew we had to beat Waterford to get that.”
