Tipperary must find the extra gear to prevail

As the vanquished team from last year, Tipp may have that bit more momentum and more hunger than Kilkenny, writes NICKY ENGLISH

IN THE week or two building up to this game, I have found a lot of people beginning to lean Tipperary’s way. So many people have been tipping them that Kilkenny are nearly coming in under the radar at this stage, which is a situation they will love and which will not be helpful to Tipperary. That would have been impossible to imagine as recently as June.

The main reason people think Tipp can win is because they believe they see vulnerability in Kilkenny. That’s the biggest repercussion of what happened in the Leinster final.

But once you really analyse the teams, the reasons for a Tipperary win aren’t totally obvious. With similar personnel present on both sides, they took a severe league beating from Kilkenny and it isn’t as though they have been bullet-proof in their three championship matches. In fact, they haven’t shown their very best form collectively for a long time.

There is a perception that Tipp are on an upward curve but I would only agree with that up to a certain point. They were really poor in the league semi-final and although they improved enough to win against Limerick, they were coming from a very low base and it took Bonnar Maher’s introduction to lift them

They improved the next day against Cork with Lar Corbett’s return but I feel they plateaued in the Munster final. The full-back line did step up considerably but that line apart, there was no improvement. The rest of the team as a unit were no better than they had been against Cork. Take their year as a whole and their form really has been patchy. For them to win tomorrow, they will have to take a significant step up collectively.

People assume they have an extra gear and I’m inclined to believe it myself. In 2009 and 2010 Tipp’s best performance of the year came in the All-Ireland final. Last year they were ready very early in the season, which can happen when new management comes in.

They put a lot of effort into beating Cork and then gave their best performance in a flawed Munster final but they stumbled against Dublin. When the performance graph of the championship trends against you it can be very hard to turn it around and while I thought at the time that the fright from Dublin would get them grounded and ready for the final, in reality the slippage continued.

I think a lot of key players will have been subconsciously harking back to 2010 and thinking of what worked for them that year. You wouldn’t say they’ve been purposely holding back but I just don’t think they’ve been ready to give that massive performance yet. It will need to come tomorrow.

And it will need to come early. We’ve seen in these games that whoever can get the upper hand in that first 15 minutes when the game is at its most intense usually wins. Last year the tone was set when Michael Fennelly put Shane McGrath on his backside in the opening five minutes. Tipperary will move their forwards around just like Galway did in the Leinster final but it’s more important from the start that they mirror and maintain Galway’s aggression. Because if Kilkenny are vulnerable, Tipp’s intensity will need to be maintained all the way through the game.

Everybody was expecting a huge Kilkenny backlash against Limerick but it never really came about. The Limerick full-back line coughed up handy goal chances that made all the difference in the quarter-final. I actually thought there were more negatives than positives for Kilkenny that day. There were signs of fatigue noticeable in some of their players, even if Limerick are much better than a lot of people give them credit for.

It comes back to this idea that once the graph of a season takes a downturn, it’s very difficult to put it right. Kilkenny had the Dublin game circled in the calendar from months out. I met Brian Cody at a function in Cork around Christmas and he was talking about Dublin even then. They were ready to function at a very high level in that game and they haven’t got back to that level since.

Some of their best players – in the forwards especially – haven’t been in their best form. As a team, even their free-taking has been unusually unreliable. Although Aidan Fogarty has looked dangerous on his return, Eoin Larkin hasn’t scored freely since the league final and Richie Power has been in and out as well, albeit that he took a heavy knock against Limerick. When you consider that they’ve lost Eddie Brennan since last year’s All-Ireland final and are facing Tipp tomorrow without Richie Hogan, you’re really putting a huge onus on Henry Shefflin to get the scores.

It would have been hard to imagine after the league final that Kilkenny would reach this part of the year still so reliant on Henry to carry the scoring burden. He will step up to his task as he always does but unless Power and Larkin step up with him, it’s hard to see Kilkenny racking up the kind of high 20-point total that usually wins them games.

The positives out of the Limerick game were the return to form of Tommy Walsh, Colin Fennelly’s prowess and, most importantly, the growing into the game of Michael Fennelly and Michael Rice. Fennelly is the most dominant midfielder in Ireland. His box-to-box influence is massive and it will be a huge test of Shane McGrath and Brendan Maher to see can they match up in midfield.

I was more confident of Tipperary winning before I sat down to analyse just how they were going to do it. You’re taking it a bit on trust that Tipperary will find that extra gear – though they have been finishing their games very strongly so far this season.

In the end, I will just take them to have that bit more momentum and more hunger than Kilkenny, as the vanquished team from last year. But there won’t be a lot in it at the end.