The first thing to note about Tipperary's young guns is that they aren't all that especially young. Of the players who made their first championship start against Waterford last Sunday, James Quigley is 25, Dillon Quirke is 24, Craig Morgan is 23 and Conor Bowe is the kid of the bunch at 22. Nobody is going to be calling them the Bonnar Babes.
The contrast with the previous generation of underage All-Ireland winners who came through to be Tipperary seniors couldn’t be starker. Pádraic, Brendan and Bonner Maher were all 20 when they made their championship debuts. Noel McGrath was younger still, just 18 when he lined up against Cork in the first round of Munster in 2009. No wonder he looked so fresh and elusive against Waterford last week – he won’t turn 32 until the week before Christmas.
Sometimes life is pure dumb luck. There’s doing good work at underage and there’s having four gold-plated generational stars rolling off the assembly line ready to hurl immediately. You can’t plan for that sort of luxury. You can only try to make sure you don’t fritter it away.
Colm Bonnar has a far more commonplace scenario on his hands in this championship. With Pádraic and Brendan Maher retired and injuries sidelining Séamie Callanan and Bubbles O'Dwyer, the Tipperary manager has no choice but to freshen up the whole scene. Ready or not, here they come.
"You have to give them their road now," says Eoin Kelly. "The level of conditioning now across the whole scene is so different to even a decade ago. There's the odd exception but mostly young lads aren't physically ready for championship hurling at 19. In most cases, it takes two or three years of being in and around a county panel before it's even fair to put a lad in. You need those couple of years.
“Their time is now. You look at an intercounty career in the modern game – it’s basically what you do from 23, 24 to 30. I don’t know if you’ll see many 10-year careers again, purely because the physical side of the game means it takes longer to get started. The longevity isn’t what it used to be. So for these lads, now is the time.”
Kelly was in the backroom team under Liam Sheedy and has seen up close how the next wave of Tipp hurlers has been rising up. Some of them were earmarked from a long way out – Morgan captained the under-20s to the 2019 All-Ireland, Bowe was Munster under-20 hurler-of-the-year in that campaign. But everyone finds their own way up the mountain.
“Someone like James Quigley is a perfect example,” Kelly says. “He was a minor in 2015 but he maybe drifted off the county scene a bit for a few years. Then he was brilliant for Kiladangan and was brought into the senior panel a couple of years ago.
“You look at him now compared to when he came in. His whole build is different – he has that lean, athletic look of an intercounty hurler. Before, when he was a top-class club hurler, he was stocky and very physically strong but two years of intercounty strength and conditioning, diet, nutrition, all that stuff – that’s what has got him ready to do what he did last Sunday.”
Balancing Act
Throughout Sheedy’s second stint, there was always an underlying push-and-pull going on. On one side, there was the need to extract the last best years out of their established stars. On the other, they had to try and find room to bring along the players who had cut a Pac-Man swathe through the underage scene through the latter half of the 2010s.
When Sheedy was appointed ahead of the 2019 campaign, Tipp had gathered up three All-Irelands and four Munster titles at minor and under-20/21 level, all in the previous four seasons. Yet when he named his team for the Munster final last year, the only graduate of any of those teams who had grabbed a starting berth was Jake Morris.
Others were in and out. Cian Darcy, Mark Kehoe and Ger Browne got minutes off the bench. Paddy Cadell started against Waterford in the All-Ireland semi-final last July. But when it came right down to it, the last team Sheedy put out in 2021 was broadly similar to the first one he put out in 2019. It was nobody's fault and it wasn't even necessarily a bad thing. It was just how things panned out.
“Covid didn’t help their case,” Kelly says. “You look at 2020 and that was disrupted for everybody – you had a quick league and then it was just straight championship, no round-robin, everything done in a hurry. And then when we came back in in 2021, we had about three weeks before the league started and then you were nearly straight into championship again. So it was a bad two years to be trying to force your way on to the team because there was no real breathing space.
“But even if it had all been normal, it’s very hard to take ownership of a dressingroom when it’s already filled with seasoned, experienced lads who have won All-Irelands. It’s the same in any walk of life – you don’t go into a new place of work and no matter what your personality is, you’re reluctant to say anything until you get a lie of the land. But a couple of years pass and people move on and suddenly you’re looking around and going, ‘Right, people are looking to me now. Time to take this thing over’.
“Development isn’t really the word with these lads now. They’ve been knocking around the panel for a few years. They’re at the stage where they probably feel that with some of the older lads having left, they can get their arms around the place now. They feel more comfortable taking ownership of the dressingroom. And when lads do that, that’s when you see the best of them.”
Kelly was in Walsh Park last Sunday, a face in the crowd again, nothing more. Like most Tipperary people, he came away with more pep in his step than he arrived, even though the result had gone against them. Part of it was the fact that Tipp had outrun their odds. But part of it too was that with the exception of Noel McGrath, their best performers had all been sourced in those successful underage teams.
Morgan, Quigley, Quirk and Kehoe all wired into Waterford and carried the fight. Bowe was settling in nicely at wing forward before picking up a nasty hand-injury just before the break. Conor Stakelum came off the bench to score a point and play a major role in Kehoe's second goal. Small sample size, yes. But none of what they showed last week was unpromising.
“Tipperary will always have hurlers,” Kelly points out. “These lads have built up a bit of resilience over the years and that will stand to them. If you look at someone like Mark Kehoe, he has been there for a while and has started games over the past few years but it has been tough for him. He played against Limerick in 2020 in brutal conditions. He has learned his trade the hard way.
“So it was great to see him do what he did last week. I came away from Walsh Park feeling a bit of excitement for the road ahead for Tipperary. They will have to be feeling that they can have a go at Clare now and see where it takes them. They have had big shoes to fill but it’s their dressingroom now. It’s their team.”
