Liam Sheedy: I owed it to the boys of the 2010 All-Ireland winning Tipp team
Liam Sheedy has said he owed it to the survivors of the 2010 All-Ireland-winning Tipperary team to return as manager. Noel McGrath (28), Seamus Callanan (30), and the Mahers, Brendan (30), Pádraic (30), and Patrick (29) are the five members from the current set-up who were involved when Sheedy, during his first incarnation as Tipp boss, steered the Premier County to All-Ireland glory at the beginning of this decade.
A chief motivating factor in Sheedy returning for a second stint, eight years after he vacated the post, was the opportunity to again work with the aforementioned quintet before they called time on their inter-county days - players who, Sheedy claimed, “transformed” his life in 2010 by stopping Kilkenny’s drive for five and returning Tipperary to hurling’s summit.
“The younger guys I had in 2006 as minors (Brendan Maher, Pádraic Maher, and Seamus Callanan) probably have a few years left in their careers so if I didn’t come back and join this group now, I probably wouldn’t get a chance to work with those players I worked with [at senior level] across 2008-2010. If there was any group I owed it to, they were really good to me previously,” said Sheedy.
His head was also turned by a conversation he had with Michael Ryan after the 2016 All-Ireland-winning manager ended his tenure in the Tipp hot-seat in August of last year.
“Michael is a close friend of mine. When I sat down and spoke to him, he said if you can find the time, go do it.
I am really enjoying it because I have good people around me and players that really want to give their best for themselves and their county.
No question but Sheedy was taking a risk in seeking to return to the bainisteoir’s bib. Tipperary failed to win a single championship fixture in 2018, their season over by mid-June. As Ger Loughnane surmised at half-time during the county’s Munster SHC tie at home to Cork in May of last year, a game where Tipperary found themselves nine adrift at the break, “Tipperary have come to the end of the line”, before adding, “when a team gets old, they lose energy”.
The 2010 All-Ireland-winning manager knew this Tipperary group were anything but yesterday’s men.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I would say, sometimes, when you are down, you are not as far down as people have you. And when you are up, you are not as good as you think either, so there is a balancing act here. In fairness, I knew these guys, knew what was in them, and how passionate they are about their county. They have responded well.
“2018 was unfortunate. They could have found themselves in the top three, a puck of a ball in a game they looked to have full control of in Thurles (versus Clare). Maybe, it hasn’t done the group any harm in terms of their hunger and appetite for it having watched all that went on in the 2018 championship.”
He added: “A lot of people might have felt that I would be coming in and there would be pressure on but I am free as a bird. I love being around the lads, I love being out on the pitch three times a week with them.
Where the year goes, no one can tell us, but all I can say is that when it stops, we couldn’t or won’t have been able to give anymore.
Despite losing four of their six league outings this spring, following as it did last year’s difficult summer, Sheedy is adamant that he never doubted this team’s ability to hit the required notes come the beginning of the Munster round-robin.
“You go back through the matches, most of them were lost by a point. We had ‘losing by a point-itis’ there for a while and it wasn’t a bad time to have it. But you felt there was something building because we had a lot of guys coming back from injury.
“Behind the scenes, the work they were doing to get themselves right was all the time moving at pace. Anything they have been challenged with and they have been challenged night in night out, week in week out, they rise to the challenge, and I think we are starting to see the benefits of it.
“Now, there are aspects of our game that we wouldn’t be happy with. We haven’t really found our full flow for any period of 70 minutes but the lads are continuing to work on that. We are moving in the right direction.”
For the second year running, the Munster and Leinster hurling finals will be played on the same day. And given there are only seven hurling championship fixtures to sustain followers of the small ball throughout July and August, Sheedy cannot understand, as has been the case with the Munster SFC final, why one of the deciders wasn’t moved to the Saturday evening.
“I thought after last year that there might have been a change. There are a lot of hurling folk that would go to both matches. If you had one on Saturday evening and one on Sunday, they would get even bigger crowds because there would be a lot of people from Munster that would go to the Leinster final and vice versa.”
