Pádraic Maher explains why the public interest in what's been going on behind the scenes in the Premier county has actually galvanised the squad, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

HE DIDN’T lick it off the stones, that much we can say. When Pádraic Maher and Cathal Naughton got into a brief bout of knuckle-knocking before the start of the Munster semi-final, it brought from referee Brian Gavin a little ice for the fire in the shape of a yellow card apiece.

Consensus afterwards held that the early warning weighed heavier on Naughton’s mind than it did on Maher’s – the thinking being that the Cork wing forward was, shall we say, less accustomed than the Tipp wing back to hitting the road with a card for luggage.

Old-timers in the Tipp crowd were able to reach for a better yarn that that though. Away back 20 years ago with the club, Maher’s father Paddy hunkered down for a spot of pre-throw-in do-se-do with Nenagh’s John Heffernan.

The referee that day hadn’t the lenient mood on him that Gavin had in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and Paddy Maher saw the line before the four midfielders even bumped shoulders.

“Yeah, he was sent off before the throw-in,” smiles the younger Maher now. “His mother at half-time then said, ‘Why is he playing so bad?’ His sister had to say he wasn’t even on the field!”

Nobody was wondering anything of the sort at either half-time or full-time three weeks ago. Maher fizzed and spat like bacon in a pan all afternoon, noticeably shifting up a gear after John O’Brien was red-carded with 25 minutes to go.

One cloud-clawing catch soon after the sending-off served notice of how the rest of the game was going to be and when the rum business of picking a man of the match came round later on, only Noel McGrath and Bonner Maher had stronger claims.

The yellow card wasn’t something that held you back then Paudie, no?

“To be honest, no it wasn’t,” he says. “Brian Gavin was refereeing and just said, ‘Come on, get on with your game’. He was just saying get on with it and I didn’t really pay much heed to it. It one of them things, it’s all part of Munster Championship hurling and I just got on with it.

“I was delighted overall to come out of Cork with a one-point win. It hasn’t happened Tipperary too often in the last number of years. History shows that. Especially going down to 14 men for the last 15 or 20 minutes, whatever it was. We showed great heart and determination.

“Maybe over the last 10 years Tipperary teams mightn’t have shown that with the blue and gold jersey on, but we managed to get it out. I was delighted with the performance really. We’d have taken a one-point win before the game.”

Indeed, there are one-point wins and there are one-point wins.

Against Cork, the team that ushered in the lowest point of Tipp’s year so far with their win in the league semi-final, it felt bigger than the slim margin made out. It gave them a chance to take a look at the water that had gushed under the bridge in the interim and reflect on the distance they’d travelled. It was only a few months but it felt like a lifetime.

Loose talk hops off the walls in every county, but Tipp seemed to unearth more than their share of it through May and early June.

It came to a head with Declan Ryan’s dressing down of his players in a team meeting after the Limerick match, the contents of which got inflated to near-Saipanian levels of invective by the time the general populace was finished circulating it.

For Maher, the difference between April Tipp and July Tipp is vast.

“I think we have come on in leaps and bounds as a group. We have taken a lot of hits. The public have been talking about Tipperary in certain ways that we don’t like. It’s all after galvanising us together. We were always a tight knit bunch the last number of years and I think we showed that again, fighting back against Limerick, not performing to the best of our ability, going down to 14 men against Cork and coming out with the victory.

“We’ve shown that we are battle hardened and we are up for the challenge.

“I’d say listening to all the stuff that’s been going on, it’s very hard not to [be galvanised]. We just say we know what we’re capable of as a group and we just stick together. We know what we’re capable of doing. The goal at the start of the year was to win the All-Ireland back again and the Munster final is part of that, go route one. We have to get over Waterford to keep that challenge up.”

It must be hard all the same, living among your people yet trying to live apart from them. Like walking through thick cloud without getting wet from the rain. Surely you can’t not listen?

“Ah yeah, you listen, but you laugh off most of it. You might keep it to the back of your mind just to prove people wrong. We’re slowly but surely doing that and hopefully we can keep on to doing that against Waterford.”

Tomorrow is his third Munster final meeting with Waterford in four years.

The other two have been settled by Tipperary goals – four in 16 minutes in 2009, seven in an hour last year. What tends to get lost in the lights of the gaudy scorelines is that Maher was immense on both days.

His was the inch-perfect delivery that put Lar Corbett through for his first goal after four minutes last year, just as his was the crucial block on Maurice Shanahan that shut Waterford down when they were grimly building a comeback’s momentum in 2009. For all Tipp’s new-found mojo, he’s certain Waterford won’t stay down-trodden forever.

“If anything Waterford are going to be coming with fire in their bellies,” he says, “especially after what happened last year. That wasn’t the real Waterford team. Last year was a farce of a Munster final – it’s never going to happen again. Everything worked for us, nothing worked for Waterford and it’s going to be completely different this year. It’s going to be a real battle of a game and whatever way it comes we’ll take it and hopefully come out on the right end of the result.

“They have people like Ken McGrath in their back room staff now and he’s inspirational. He’s inspirational to me. I watched him growing up all the years and he was one of my heroes in hurling. I know the way the Waterford people feel about him. He’s going to have them jumping out of their boots for the Munster final below in Cork and we’re going to be the same way.”

And if he happens to jump out of them a little early, he won’t take too much notice of any warnings that might come his way from referee Cathal McAllister.

Just wouldn’t be the family way.