Seán Moran talks to Tipperary manager Babs Keating, who has risked much to take the job again
There is frequently the suspicion of hubris in managerial comebacks but even by those standards Michael "Babs" Keating is a characteristically outsize example.
For over 40 years his hurling legend has unfolded from the wunderkind who lost three All-Ireland minor finals as a prelude to breaking into the great Tipperary team of the 1960s to the man who takes the county into tomorrow's Guinness Munster hurling final on the hallowed turf of Semple Stadium.
By the record books and common consent he was a great hurler and a talented footballer but for the modern age he is the manager who ended the Tipperary famine in Munster, which by the late 1980s had stretched back to his own final All-Ireland success in 1971.
High-energy interludes in Laois, Offaly and UCD aside, Keating's most obvious impact since he stepped down from the Tipp job in 1994 had been as a commentator and analyst in the Sunday Times. Blunt and unmoved by the need to palliate strong opinions, these columns were entertaining and provocative.
It was on radio four years ago this weekend that he suggested Waterford supporters would be leaving the Munster final against Tipperary 10 minutes early.
They could have; instead they were busy embroidering victory in a breakthrough provincial final.
The penchant for speaking out reasserted itself during the spring when Keating hit out at his team's performance against Galway, contrasting what he characterised as the players' confidence in looking for things off the pitch with their reticence on it.
Now in the lead up to tomorrow's final and his team having attained some worthwhile rehabilitation in their unexpected progress through Munster, not even Babs is going to revisit his comments during what was a traumatic NHL, featuring industrial beatings from Kilkenny as well as the Galway defeat.
There are better things to contemplate even if the bookies are sufficiently unimpressed by Tipp's chances against All-Ireland champions Cork to offer them at 4 to 1.
But this is a Munster final in Thurles between the occasion's classical rivals and, so the theory runs, anything can happen.
Having had the highest success as a player and manager, Keating was taking a risk in returning as manager last autumn with Tipperary firmly stuck in the second tier of All-Ireland contenders. But there were neither obvious yet available candidates nor a whirlwind of applicants for a demanding job.
The county won an All-Ireland five years ago, recent enough for high expectations but also sufficiently distant to allow an at times spectacular decline. Still when he was approached he accepted and appointed John Leahy and Tom Barry as his selectors.
Twelve years on from his last season in charge of the county and eight after he resigned in controversy halfway through Offaly's All-Ireland winning season of 1998, Keating's best chance of surviving in the modern world was his willingness to involve others.
Aside from the praetorian guard of former associates like Donie Nealon and John O'Donoghue, Nicky English, a protégé from the 1989 and '91 teams who went on to manage Tipperary to that 2001 All-Ireland, has been invited to some sessions and Keating has gone farther afield to help himself acclimatise.
"I SPOKE TO Mickey Harte (manager of All-Ireland football champions Tyrone), heard about everything from how he took a dietician on board to his methods of training. I had to update myself from the '90s to 2006. I've tried everything that was tried by other managers and was successful. The right sports psychologist, the trainer we wanted - every box has been ticked.
"I'm enjoying it with the experience I have and that I've brought with me - the mistakes I've made dealing with people in the past and having had the opportunity to reflect on the previous eight years I had in the position.
"When I accepted the job I said to myself, 'you've no guarantees about putting a team together' - nobody has when you're training a team.
"All you have to do is look at Tyrone at the moment and the problems that have beset Mickey Harte. That can happen Cork, it can happen Tipp in the morning."
Although he has ticked all the boxes he isn't sure there are any more than he ticked back in the 1980s and '90s.
"I wouldn't say there are. The basic situations that arise don't change."
He does, however, acknowledge a generation gap and the need to tune in to his players through the appointment of DCU's Dr Siobhán McArdle as sports psychologist.
But there is a curiously visceral theory at the heart of his approach, one that he attributes to his working career with oil corporation Esso.
"I've listened to all these lectures on motivation and I still think the greatest one is fear. When I say fear I mean in my case in Esso, of not doing the job properly, fear of being demoted or the boss getting at me.
"By and large Esso ran a great system but there was a certain element of fear running through it and fools weren't tolerated easily. I think Tipperary people expect me to do the same."
In pursuit of this he places great emphasis on concentration and discipline.
"Ninety-nine per cent concentration represents 100 per cent failure: the misfortunate jockey in Leopardstown who threw up his arms with 50 yards to go. I remember the first stage of the Rás this year into Enniscorthy and a poor hoor after cycling 120 miles put his hands up in the air with 20 yards to go and was beaten by that much.
"I've a page devoted to discipline and concentration is closely aligned to that. Every night I go training I guarantee you I have to pull fellas up for concentration.
"There are 14 points of discipline, some of them obvious like no player should be getting a yellow card if at all possible. But the most vital one there is that no inter-county player should strike a ball without having a reason for striking it."
If there have been criticisms - and there have, most trenchantly in the Sunday Tribune - that Keating dwells too much in the past of Tipp's glorious achievements, that was his upbringing and has been his hurling life.
The place of the Munster final in his catalogue of personal mythologies is strong and goes back to childhood whereas he has unshakeable faith in the craft and experience gained by the team of the 1960s, which won four All-Irelands in five years. It's a subject that animates him.
"The team in the '60s," he says, "Donie and O'Donoghue and myself, there was no area we didn't understand. There was nothing you could ask them that they wouldn't have an answer to. Take a player and get him to work on this part of his game or on that. That team had a master's degree.
"In case anyone from Cork, Kilkenny or somewhere else is thinking, 'who does he think he is?' you must remember that team in the '60s came at the tail end of Waterford, Wexford and also Kilkenny - great teams that we had to play.
"I don't want to be presumptuous and say we wrote the manual of hurling because we didn't but that team had it."
Keating was reared in south Tipperary and grew up in an Ireland caught between wartime austerity and the economic depression of the 1950s. Hurling wasn't a leisure option or a lifestyle choice but just about the only diversion on offer apart from working on the family farm during boyhood summers.
The centrepiece to those seasons was the seemingly perennial meeting of Cork and Tipperary in Munster finals at a time when the counties dominated the game, winning six successive finals between them. Tipp's three-in-a-row came first from 1949-'51 and Cork's followed immediately afterwards.
"We were like bonhams in the back of my father's van going to a fair," Keating remembers. "It was like a pilgrimage in those days for Tipperary people to go to Limerick - Cork-Tipp was always in Limerick those days apart from the 1950 game in Killarney.
"My father was a hurling fanatic and my mother was totally supportive. We were among the first in the queue when the gates in Limerick opened and would sit patiently for an hour and a half before any activity started. You had huge crowds but sure they'd no comfort and half of them didn't see the match. They only heard shouts and roars when there was a score.
"If Tipp were beaten on Munster final day it was nearly like a wake. 1952 was my first. They had won the three in a row, 1949, 1950 and '51. They were my heroes and I was deflated coming home that road but I remember the excitement of Ring coming out on to the field."
Although these are different, less impressed times he still sees the sense of wonder in the gaze of kids down at training as they watch Eoin Kelly practise and feels the enduring rhythms of the summers he knew as a child and those that will stretch into the future.
"This is my last run. I don't know how long this period is going to last but I know I'm not going to be in Joe McKenna's situation next Sunday evening.
"With all of the work and preparation we have put into this squad I don't think they'll leave us down. Being beaten with a good performance wouldn't be being left down.
"There's no one in Tipperary going to be hurt if this squad gives a good account of themselves."
