On the night after the All-Ireland final, a knowing crowd congregated outside the Thurles Sarsfields clubhouse, waiting for the Tipperary bus. Inside the stadium, tens of thousands of supporters waited to greet their champions, but before that rapturous embrace there was a ceremony that hadn’t taken place for 60 years.
On the road-facing wall of the clubhouse is an image of every Thurles Sars player to have captained Tipperary to an All-Ireland title. Since Jimmy Doyle in 1965, the number had been stuck on eight. Two years ago, when he was made Tipperary captain for the second time, Ronan Maher was asked by the team sports psychologist Cathal Sheridan about his goals. In that context, they spoke about visualisation.
Maher told him that he wanted his face to appear on the Thurles Sars “Wall of Legends”. After that conversation, Maher took a picture of the wall, leaving a blank space where he imagined his face might appear. He saved it to his phone as his screensaver so that the image and what it would trigger in his mind was part of his daily life.
On the day after the final, under deadline pressure, David McElgunn, a local artist, painted the first draft of Maher’s face on the wall. When the Tipperary bus pulled up outside the clubhouse, a long ceremonial curtain in the blue and white of the club’s colours was draped along the Wall of Legends. Just like in his dreams, Maher pulled the cord.
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A day later he restored the screensaver on his phone to a picture of his girlfriend.
Lifting the cup had been the end of something that might never have led to anything. For years, Tipp had been sabotaged by false starts and dead ends. Maher had played on the last Tipperary team to win an All-Ireland in 2019 and then on Tipperary teams that couldn’t escape the tyranny of their failures and the furious censure of their own crowd. For much of that time, he was the best player or the second-best player on a team going nowhere.
When he was made captain for the first time in 2022, Maher was selected by his peers. In a tumbledown season, they suffered four defeats in the Munster championship, beaten easily by all the teams with designs on the title. Tommy Dunne, the former Tipperary captain, was part of the management team.
“We were all over the place that year,” says Dunne. “Ronan had some brilliant moments that year and some mixed moments, but that was right across the board. The issue was a systemic thing. I remember the very last match in the stadium that year (a 12-point defeat to Cork) and how down it was. And I remember Ronan having to speak. I still remember how hard it must have been for him but how well he carried the disappointment and the way he just articulated his feelings.
“I remember him saying that Tipp will come again and this group will come again. A year like that could make or break you. It was never going to break him. I knew that day walking away that it was never going to break him. He dug in and he figured it out and he came again, and that’s the thing with him. The victories won’t drive him into the clouds and the defeats won’t drive him into the ground. He’ll just stay going.”
When Liam Cahill took over as manager for the following season the captaincy passed to Noel McGrath, but for 2024 it returned to Maher. That summer ended in a bitter bankruptcy too. Tipp failed to win a game in the Munster championship; Limerick beat them by 15 points, Cork by 18.
“I didn’t think I’d get the opportunity to captain Tipperary ever again,” said Maher on The Square Ball podcast last year. “We had a really, really bad season. It’ll probably go down in record as one of the worst. [The following year] I didn’t know what Liam [Cahill] was going to do and he asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to lead the Tipperary team again.
“He said he wanted me to lift silverware this year (2025) and he said, ‘I promise you, you will’. He made me captain and I was in tears walking away after it.”
This will be Maher’s fourth year as Tipperary captain. Until 2010, the captaincy in Tipp was in the gift of the county champions and under those conditions, Tommy Dunne captained Tipp in six seasons. Since that rule changed, nobody has held the honour as much as Maher.
In every dressingroom, though, leadership is not by appointment. “You look at him,” says Eamon O’Shea, the former Tipperary manager and coach, “and you had that sense that he was a natural player to lead. He was modest, he took responsibility – he never shirked responsibility. Made mistakes – knew he made mistakes. Players recognise all of those things, whether you’re named captain or not.”
O’Shea gave him his championship debut in 2014, three months shy of his 19th birthday. In a roll of the dice, he started at centre field against Galway in a convulsive qualifier match in Semple Stadium and was replaced at half-time. His direct opponent, Pádraig Brehony, was taken off at half-time too, both of them quietly overwhelmed.
“It was a really hard decision at the time, because he was so young,” says O’Shea. “You’re saying [to yourself], ‘It was my fault for putting him on’. But I suppose it reflects the trust we had in him. Afterwards, then, you have to build him back up and that’s what we tried to do.
“I remember talking to him a few times and I remember after one conversation where I was saying, ‘This is going to happen [for you], I’m not sure whether it’s going to happen this year, but it’s going to happen – this is my belief, this is our belief’. At one stage, he just looked at me and he said, ‘You don’t need to keep going on about it – I trust you’. I think I was overdoing it,” he says with a laugh.
Maher didn’t play another minute in that championship and when Tipp reached the All-Ireland final, he didn’t make the matchday squad for the drawn game or the replay. “I probably would have been thick enough [about it],” Maher said, years later. “So, you take all that with you. And you bag it.”
A year later, he played every game. For the last 10 years, he hasn’t missed a championship match.
When Ronan broke through, his older brother Pádraic was already a pillar of the team, celebrated and decorated. In their shape and style and bearing, there were enough similarities for fast comparisons. The differences were nuanced, but noticeable too and undeniable.
“They were very close and still are very close,” says O’Shea. “While Paudie wasn’t interfering, he was a strong anchor for Ronan [when he came on to the panel]. But then Ronan had that coltish exuberance that was a delight as well. He wasn’t coming in watching himself, watching his back. Playing for Tipperary was a big thing for him. He just had this exuberance to say, ‘I’ll take this on. Where do you want me to play?’.
“Paudie is a bit quieter, I’d say. Ronan has more devil in him. Ronan would take more chances with the ball. Paudie would be more measured. Paudie learned how to play a ball the way Séamus Callanan wanted or Bubbles (O’Dwyer) wanted, but Ronan would have had it more naturally.”
They grew up about a mile and a half outside Thurles, on the Nenagh road. Their uncle Paddy McCormack, the Thurles Sars coach, lived next door. The legacy of their childhoods were tattooed on both houses, the mark of relentless practise.
“Every slate on my roof and every tile on Helen’s (Ronan and Padraic’s mother, and Paddy’s sister) are cracked from hurling balls,” says McCormack.
In the last few months, Ronan has bought a house in Thurles, though he still uses his mother’s shed as a workshop for making hurleys. Paddy says he replaced the tiles on the shed roof only this week, squaring an old debt.
Pádraic was in his early teens when their parents split up; Ronan was six years younger. At that stage of their lives the age gap was so significant that the break-up was bound to impact them differently.
“Ronan didn’t really understand,” wrote Pádraic in his autobiography, All On The Line, “and it would have been tough on him for a few years after. Our father used to come home every so often for a few days and would spend a bit of time with him, but he’d obviously have to go back to Wales, where he was working and living, and Ronan used to get very upset every time he’d leave.
“It was tough for him, but I think he came out of it stronger and it made him a better person, a more robust character. I always admire him for that, because he just took it and went with it.”
On the Tipp team, Pádraic and Ronan evolved in different ways. Ronan developed a reputation as a fire fighter. “When I was involved with the management team under Liam Sheedy (2019 to 2021),” says Eoin Kelly, the former Tipperary captain, “the top man on the opposition forward line that you wanted to quench, Ronan was allocated to him every time. Under Liam Cahill, in the last 12 or 18 months, they reverted back to Ronan picking up the danger man.”
In the build-up to the All-Ireland final last year, Maher looked at videos of the 2019 All-Ireland semi-final and final. In those games he marked Conor McDonald of Wexford and Colin Fennelly of Kilkenny. Fennelly was having his best season for years and had scorched Limerick in the semi-final. Maher, though, neutralised them both.
In last year’s All-Ireland he was assigned to Brian Hayes, the player on whom the Cork attack hinged. Going into the game, Hayes was favourite for Hurler of the Year, but by the end of the game Maher had joined him in the wider conversation for the award. On The Sunday Game that evening, Maher was named Man of the Match.
“Thankfully, it was nearly the very same thing [as 2019],” said Maher. “Balls were coming down on top of us.”
And that was the thing: for Maher it was the perfect scenario; a physical duel, aerial contests, a trial of strength and cuteness. It is always assumed that Maher is vulnerable to pace, but it is remarkable how rarely that comes true.
“Lots of people would say Ronan will be caught here if he’s on this lad, or he doesn’t have the legs for that,” says Dunne. “You’d have had plenty of that at the start of last year as well – ‘You can’t play Ronan here and you can’t play Ronan there’. But Ronan figures it out. He knows what his limits are. He knows if he’s on a certain guy what needs to happen.”
It is extremely unusual for a player of his class to have a side hustle as a man marker, but that was the range of his usefulness. O’Shea says you would “pay into a training session just to see him in a warm-up, such is his striking ability and the shape of the strike and the carefulness. If you look at golf, he has that kind of attention to detail in the strike.
“So, you had a dilemma all the time with him [about being a man marker or not], because you wanted him on the ball, you wanted patterns to make sure he was receiving puckouts and you know he’s going to be hurling all the time. If he has to do something to stop an opponent he will do it, but he is trying to be a hurler all the time.”
When this Tipp team was gasping for air, though, Maher suffered like everybody else in the dressing room. There were no allowances for greatness or past services rendered. In sport, as in politics, approval is chained to a recency bias.
“We weren’t getting out of Munster and you’d be walking down the town and people were shouting in your face,” said Maher on The Square Ball podcast. “People giving out, straight to your face. I got a good bit of that as captain as well. It was a tough place to be. As players we questioned everything about what we were doing.
“It’s a skill in itself [to deal with it]. You have to take it on the chin. You’re grinding your teeth with these people because you’re not winning, they’re not supporting you and you’re questioning that aspect of it as well.”
Those questions passed, though there is never a final answer. Maher ended last season struggling with the injury known as Gilmore’s groin and he hardly trained in the fortnight before the All-Ireland. In the off-season it needed an operation and rest. He didn’t return to the team until Tipp’s second last league game against Waterford. A week later TJ Reid gave him a share of discomfort in Semple Stadium. This weekend it will be Brian Hayes, fired up.
And Maher? Unblinking.
