The task for Tipperary football manager Philly Ryan is 'a building job'

As Tipperary look to avenge last year’s surprise Munster Senior Football Championship defeat by Waterford, Tipperary manager Philly Ryan admits that Clonmel would have been his preferred venue for this weekend’s re-match.

Instead, the provincial quarter-final will be played at FBD Semple Stadium at 6pm this Saturday evening.

“It’s a local rivalry and we would have loved for the game to be played in Clonmel and bring a good crowd in because geographically you have Rathgormack, The Nire, different pockets of Waterford football on the outskirts of Clonmel, as well as Grangemockler, Mullinahone, Ardfinnan; all traditional football areas and they’d all really love a clash of Tipp and Waterford in Clonmel,” he says.

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“But it’s in Thurles and hopefully there’ll be a good crowd and hopefully we’ll get a good game. The request was made (to play the game in Clonmel) on behalf of the players and it wasn’t ceded to, unfortunately.

“I think it was just seen that Clonmel was too small a venue for a Munster Championship game so they wanted to keep it in the stadium.

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“We’d look to go to Clonmel or any other venue that we can take a team into because personally, and I think it’s proven as well, that any team that comes into Thurles to play us, they are coming into the second or third best stadium in the country.

“They’re getting a bounce off it, bringing supporters down to it and they’re really enjoying the surface and I suppose they’re enjoying the stadium itself and the atmosphere. So I don’t think it does a huge amount for ourselves in terms of a crowd or in terms of how we play the game.

“Certainly at the moment, we’re a bit young and with the injuries we have I feel we could just be stretched in Thurles as well, so it’s a large venue to play in, given the age profile of the fellas”.

In what is the Clonmel Commercials clubman’s first season in charge of the county’s senior footballers, Clonmel was the venue for two of their national league games. It was a campaign that started promisingly, with Tipp recording two wins and a draw in their opening three matches, before subsequently fizzling out, meaning that they will spend another season in Division Four next spring.

“I think we might have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves after the first couple of games,” he says.

“Not to be disingenuous or disrespectful to any opposition, we were probably lucky with the teams we played starting off.
We were in a good place with new management, a new squad coming in and we were injury-free as well for the first couple of games. We had Seanie O’Connor, Luke Boland and Jack Harney on the field. Steven O’Brien was able to get on the field along with Cathal Deely and they’re five players that we were looking at starting that were definitely out.

“The London game was the hammer blow. We lost in injury time and didn’t raise a gallop, didn’t get going and Limerick then gave us a lesson the week after, and we then went down to Wexford and fought hard.

“But what we found after Wexford was that the exertions took a toll on everybody, especially the young fellas, that we just weren’t able to cope with the demands we brought to the Wexford game, and the last day, Wicklow just wiped us with fourteen men”.

How difficult is it to blend players into the group when the experienced players aren’t available?

“It’s a fair question and it’s not easy to blend them in. It was hard to get that mix right. The likes of Steven O’Brien and Luke Boland are around the 30 mark and have given a lot of service.

“To see the younger lads coming in must be heartening but it was hard to blend everything together, hard to blend it in with the new rules and not having pre-season competitions didn’t help us either.

“We needed a few games to get the new rules under our belt, see what could be tweaked with it and it would have given us two or three more games. Then we may have been able to try lads out before going into the league.

“The league seemed to start very quickly and end very quickly; it was very compact and when you pick up an injury in the league, that was the league done for a lot of lads and there was no coming back from it.

“We got twelve, thirteen or fourteen new starters in during the league campaign, and in total we introduced around seventeen fellas to inter-county football.

“In Division Four, you might think you can get away with that but you can’t, it’s too high a level and it’s just too competitive at the moment.

“But look, they’ve got experience of it now and they’ll have games under their belt coming into championship. A run in the Tailteann Cup, given where we finished in the league, that’s where we’re going to be heading for regardless. Look, we’ll hope to have them right coming up against Waterford and then hopefully Clare and on into the Tailteann Cup then”.

It has been a period of adjustment not just for those new players this season but for the manager as well.
He says, “It’s been a huge learning curve for me!

“There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t anticipate, even the last few weeks but I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy job, I knew it wasn’t going to be a successful job overnight.

“We came in looking to stabilise this year and then maybe look to progress into next year and look for promotion. It’s going to be slow progress, we’re in for a long, slow burn here and it certainly won’t be a sprint.

“I see my job as a building job. It maybe won’t be the most successful job but it will stand to somebody in the future”.

Preparations for Saturday’s game have hardly been ideal, with some key players sidelined with injury for several weeks now.
Are the injuries a consequence of the lack of pre-season matches?

“We had a discussion about this with the medical staff and the strength and conditioning staff. Look, it’s multi-factorial, there’s a lot of things involved in it; the age of certain players, training load, injury history. It’s not just one specific thing.

“We’ve looked at it to see if there was a common trend, but there’s not. There is nothing we can identify so we just have to keep going.

“With a new squad that we were coming into the year with, maybe three or four more weeks pre-season training - even to just getting a running or strength block - particularly as a new group would have helped but it didn’t happen so we have to put up with it”.

In terms of the injuries, is he hoping to have many, or any of those players back in time for the Waterford game?

“We don’t know. They shouldn’t be back really. When the lads picked up the injuries, they picked up six-week injuries and that’s where they were at. The adrenaline will probably push them through over the next few weeks.

“I know the lads are anxious, Sean O’Connor, Steven O’Brien, Luke Boland, Cathal Deely and Jack Harney; those lads, in particular, are anxious to be back and part of the squad for the Waterford game but I think it might be a little bit too soon”.