IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Jackie Tyrrell perfectly encapsulated how Kilkenny felt about their great foes Tipperary.
“If you hurled for Kilkenny and you didn’t hate Tipperary, there was nearly something wrong with you,” he wrote in a chapter entitled ‘The Oldest Enemy’.
“Playing Tipperary always brought more pressure but we loved playing them. We loved beating them even more. We couldn’t beat them enough.
“We’d be so juiced up on adrenaline and emotion afterwards that we’d want to play them again the following day, and give them another hiding. So would the supporters.
Even when we were completely on top of Tipp, the Kilkenny people were always singing the same tune. ‘You couldn’t beat that crowd enough. The more we beat them, the sweeter it gets.’”
On Sunday, a fresh young Kilkenny side kept their foot on the throat of their old rivals, edging a tight game by a point after two stoppage-time scores.
In the last decade, the sides have clashed 23 times across league and championship. Kilkenny’s record stands at an impressive 17 wins, two draws and four defeats.
Tipperary’s nine-point win in the 2016 All-Ireland final was their last victory over the Cats. The sides drew in their 2017 league encounter, but it was last year’s spring clash in Nowlan Park where Tipperary naively left a victory behind them.
Kilkenny were a team in transition, with rookies Darren Brennan, Conor O’Shea, Conor Browne, Martin Keoghan, Pat Lyng and Luke Scanlon all included in Brian Cody’s starting XV.
The game was level heading into stoppage-time and Michael Ryan opted to leave Paudie Maher and Noel McGrath on the bench for the afternoon. Richie Leahy landed the winner in the 71st minute to hand the Cats a morale-boosting victory.
Had the roles been reversed, Kilkenny would have delighted in handing out a beating to Tipp. The young cubs grew in confidence from that point. When the teams met in the league final, Kilkenny blew the Premier County away by six points.
The negative vibes from that defeat carried through into the summer and Tipperary crashed out of Munster having failed to win one of their four championship games.
Last Sunday, Tipperary’s team included 13 men who saw game-time in the 2016 Liam MacCarthy decider. Kilkenny were missing their Ballyhale cohort and had just seven survivors from three years ago in their ranks.
But once again, Tipperary missed an opportunity to lay down a marker against their great rivals. Continually losing to a team can be damaging on a subconscious level, reinforcing Kilkenny’s superiority over Tipperary.
Cody teams have a knack of knowing how important it is to keep your great rivals down and not allowing them up for air.
More immediately, it has left Liam Sheedy’s side in danger of not making the Division 1 quarter-finals. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, considering how the league final defeats of 2017 and 2018 derailed their subsequent championship ambitions.
Jim Gavin’s record against Mayo is even more impressive than Cody’s against Tipperary. He’s beaten the Westerners 11 times since taking charge in 2013, drawing their other three meetings.
While James Horan was the last manager to complete a league and championship double over Dublin in 2012, he never looked as far away to beating the Sky Blues than on Saturday night.
Mayo arrived into Croke Park buoyed by three wins from three in the league, but Dublin sent out notice of just how much ground they need to make up to catch the All-Ireland champions.
Given how he likes his players to be intrinsically motivated, it’s possible the importance of laying down a marker for the summer wasn’t even discussed by Gavin the dressing-room before the game.
But stalwarts like Mick Fitzsimons, Jonny Cooper, Jack McCaffrey, Cian O’Sullivan, Brian Fenton, Paul Mannion and Ciaran Kilkenny would have recognised the significance of not giving Mayo a chink of light, in this legacy-defining year of all years.
The eight-point success could have been 18 had Dublin taken their goal chances. It was about as convincing a win as the Leinster kingpins have ever enjoyed over their Connacht rivals.
And when the two-highest ranked sides in Ulster met on Saturday night, it was Tyrone who prevailed over Monaghan.
Both counties went into the game needing a victory to boost their survival hopes. Tyrone were winless from their opening three games, while Monaghan had lost two on the spin following their opening day defeat of Dublin.
The Farney did not play anywhere near their potential as Mickey Harte’s men ran out surprisingly comfortable 1-16 to 0-12 victors. Monaghan beat Tyrone twice last year, but went down to the Red Hand in the All-Ireland semi-final in Croke Park.
Tyrone started 2019 in poor form. The victory over the Farney will put a spring in their step at just the right time. A Monaghan win could have sent their rivals crashing towards Division 2, but instead Malachy O’Rourke’s men find themselves mired in relegation trouble.
When the need was greatest, Tyrone were able to muster a victory over Monaghan, just like they did in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final and in the 2015 All-Ireland quarter-final.
Tipperary, Mayo and Monaghan missed another opportunity to make a statement against their foes over the weekend.
That’s not to say they won’t pull off a win if they meet in the white-heat of championship, but have they absolute conviction that it can be done?
“We didn’t think they ever fully believed it,” wrote Tyrrell of Tipperary during his playing days. “It was them trying to convince themselves that they were better than us.
“You almost felt that they couldn’t help themselves, that they were teeing themselves up to allow us to eat them alive. And we routinely did. We could beat them ten times in-a-row but we felt it still never instilled any humility in their hearts and minds of Tipperary people.
“If they beat us once, they’d act as if they had been thrashing us for a decade. Tipperary just have this unbelievable ability to gall the hell out of us. And I think they know that too.
What they didn’t realise though, was how much that attitude and arrogance fuelled us, and our drive to keep them down. No matter what they did, no matter how much talent they had, we always felt we had more men.
“We didn’t need to showboat or prance around to convince ourselves that we could beat Tipperary. All we had to do was be ourselves, to trust in ourselves and what we were about.”
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