KILLINAN END - A gritty performance in the image of Sheedy

It’s official! Liam Sheedy coming back as Tipperary manager was a bad idea.

When all was right in the world, Liam appeared as an analyst on the Sunday Game. Then it all went horribly wrong and he decided to throw his hat in the managerial ring once more. The result? The Sunday Game panel drafted in Derek McGrath and on perhaps the key weekend of the hurling year viewers are forced to endure McGrath and Dónal Óg producing a solid twenty minutes of absolute scutter where the finer detail of Tipp-Wexford scarcely gets a mention. The most important thing for them it seemed is that they got to champion one more time the system of play they espouse. The tin-hat was put on the whole proceedings when Cusack effectively claimed that failure to see the artistic merit in the sweeper system was a sign of our enduring closeness to the British culture.

Nonetheless Liam Sheedy’s exit from the Sunday Game is not without its compensations. This was a gritty honest Tipperary performance in the manager’s very own image. All invitations were there to fold and accept the apparent inevitability of the outcome. The reduction to fourteen men was one thing but concession of second goal shortly after added to the load. A five-point deficit heading down the home straight provided an ideal context for a hard-luck story. The response amounted to little short of a day for the county to be proud of forever and a day. All those valued personal qualities such as character, resilience, stoicism in the face of adversity or whatever you want to call it were there in abundance. We expect the hurling to be up to scratch but to have those other eternal qualities, which - let’s not forget - had brought the team back in last year’s games against Cork and Waterford, exhibited on the national stage was exhilarating.

 

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