Town End Column: Tipperary benefitting from unique and unusual advantage

With a lot of the U20 competitions coming to a head in the next few weeks, a lot of scrutiny has begun to fall on the GAA for another of their highly contentious and dubious ruling of the seven-day rule.

The most vehement outcry came from Cork U20 hurling boss Ben O’Connor last week after his side defeated Limerick to qualify for the Munster U20 final on May 15th.

He was very pointed in his annoyance at the rule which will likely rule out Eoin Downey from playing in the decider should he feature for Cork in the coming senior round robin games, and it is a scenario that is affecting managers and players across the country.

We have had it in several other cases across this year’s Munster U20 championship, with Clare now in a tough position with Adam Hogan’s participation in next Monday’s semi-final against Tipperary in jeapordy due to the rule with the Clare seniors playing Waterford the following Sunday.

However, with every top tier hurling county battling for and having to juggle players between the two grades in an effort to strike a balance, Tipperary have been in the unusually unique position of not being affected by this all year, whether by design or by coincidence, and as the Munster fare comes to its latter stages, the Premier look set to benefit from the lack of distraction in this regard.

We don’t know if there was a meeting at the start of the year between Liam Cahill and Brendan Cummins about keeping the U20’s at their grade but it is beginning to bare fruit now as Tipp came through the round robin with a win over Waterford who were without Mark and Patrick Fitzgerald (hurled senior against Cork), and that is a really positive thing for a group of players who were really up against it after a second half horror show against Cork in round two left them needing two wins in their final two games to progress.

At the beginning of the year, I would have been eager to see this team in action with a fair degree of expectation in fairness, considering how close they came to winning a Munster title last year with nearly half the team underage for 2023, but a shaky start really piled the pressure on Cummins and his players.

It can’t be underestimated how important the continuity of panel has been to Cummins and his management team in the last few weeks heading into the Limerick and Waterford games, as it gave them the collective time without having to manage players between teams and it more than bore fruit with the hurling a bit faster, delivering the ball far quicker than in the Clare and Cork games.

There was a good mix to Tipperary in the Limerick and Waterford games and with Clare coming to town on Monday night next, Tipp will have home advantage along without having to face the Banner captain in Adam Hogan who will likely play senior later in the week - ruling him out of the U20 semi-final.

Whatever advantage Tipp are getting from it, the collective point of everyone you ask is that the rule is ridiculous and it completely de-values the competition at its core, with the best players in the grade unable to play for reasons not based in any reality.

Where were these rules earlier in the year when college players around the same age were being flogged with Fitzgibbon Cup matches while training and playing pre-season games with U20 and senior panels?

Where is the player welfare in that scenario? Gearoid O’Connor, Rhys Shelly and Bryan O’Mara were playing Munster Hurling League games while in heavy training for Tipp, while simultaneously playing midweek college games.

The inconsistency is almost intentional and reeks of the GAA wanting to be seen to address player burnout without actually identifying the main factors in it.

Wexford GAA in fairness did get us to this point at least, as Limerick were the big losers last year when they lost their highest profile U20 player for the All-Ireland series in Cathal O’Neill, when the rule prohibited U20 players playing the grade once they had made an appearance at senior level.

Now we’re faced with having to row back on a rule that has stripped young players with the chance to play with teammates they have graced the field with since Tony Forristal in many cases, with little to no benefit to addressing player burnout in young players actually happening.

Joe Canning was on The Sunday Game last weekend and he made a valid point that intercounty players are now in an era of sports science that monitors every players workload in minute detail and that it should be a management and players decision as to whether or not a player should play both grades, and shouldn’t come down to a GAA ruling which has no research and scientific merit to back up its implementation in the first place.

The backlash has been loud across the board on this issue, and hopefully a row back and solution is found in the not too distant future.