Seizing the moment - Tipperary All-Star Andrew Ormond on a breakthrough season to remember

When asked to look back on his childhood and consider whether he ever imagined winning an All-Star, Andrew quipped, “I don’t have to go back that far. If you’d told me last year I’d be an All-Star, I would have said, ‘Where did you get that from!’”

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The sheer implausibility of this moment would have been beyond his wildest dreams. Yet, in the space of just 12 months, improbability gave way to inevitability: and among most people in hurling circles, the consensus was that Andrew Ormond would be the centre-forward on the 2025 All-Star team.

Whilst he may not have been nationally known in his early days, Andrew Ormond had already built an impressive underage career in Tipperary. 

In the 2017 Harty Cup final, he starred for Our Lady’s Secondary School, Templemore, scoring 1-1, including the first goal of the match in dramatic fashion—darting through St Colman’s College’s defence to tuck the ball tidily off his right side into the roof of the net. 

For the Harty Cup campaign, he was just 16-years-old, turning 17 around the time of the final. Notably, the victory also ended a 39-year wait for Templemore, the school’s first Harty Cup triumph since 1978.

He carried that form into inter‑county duty, helping Tipperary to Munster and All-Ireland under 20 hurling titles in 2019, including a 1-2 contribution in the All-Ireland Final against Cork.

At club level with J.K. Bracken’s, he also enjoyed early success, winning the Séamus Ó Riain Cup in 2019 and the Mid Tipperary Senior Hurling Championship in 2022, cementing his reputation as a dependable forward. 

His steady rise culminated in February 2024, when he made his senior debut for Tipperary in the National Hurling League, a long‑awaited step onto the senior stage after years of underage success and perseverance.

Andrew’s breakthrough game this year came in a crucible of pressure: the championship round-robin clash away to Clare in Ennis. Heading into that match he approached it knowing the margin for error was wafer-thin. 

“I hadn’t really taken the chances I’d been given,” he admitted to the Tipperary  Star. “I knew, if this one slipped through my fingers, another opportunity might never come. You can either accept that fact or run from it, but I accepted it—and I got a bit of luck along the way. There were two goal chances handed to me, and I had to take them.”  

By the final whistle, he had scored 2-1, Andrew had taken his chance and announced himself on the championship stage.

Most people in Tipperary will remember Andrew from his underage career as an intelligent corner-forward. But this year, he metamorphosed into a different type of player—a physically stronger, ball-winning centre-forward who made direct, darting runs from deep. 

When asked what gave him the self-belief to become a first-team starter, Andrew was candid: “Physically, it was the culmination of a couple of years’ work, but particularly last winter. I worked very hard with the likes of Angelo Walsh, our S&C coach, and Amy McGuire, our nutritionist—who doesn’t get enough credit; she is absolutely brilliant.”

Admittedly, he says: “I am definitely not the biggest on the team, but you just want to be able to hold your own against the ferocity of the tackles that would be coming in at inter-county level.”

Andrew says the self-belief to become a first-team starter also came from the management giving him confidence. “The management puts a little bit of confidence in you, and you repay that faith by doing your bit for the team,” he explains. 

“Once you get that first big moment—like scoring a goal—that gives you the confidence to realise that you belong here and replaces those feelings where you’re trying to feel like you belong.”

On his new positional shift to the half forward line Andrew says “as the game has evolved over the last couple of years the skillsets that you have as a corner forward can be used in various different positions. I would have played centre forward a lot for my club this past few years so that did help.” 

In terms of adjusting to his new role in the team he said “I don’t think about it too much, I try and play it as you see it. It was probably not a position I would’ve seen myself in at the start of the year being out around the middle of the pitch but as the year went on I grew to love it.”

When asked how Tipperary produced such an effective performance in the final, Andrew was clear that momentum from the semi-final played a big role. “That two-week break from the semi to the final was really nice because you don’t have too long to reflect and you don’t have too long to wait either,” he said. 

He admitted that nerves are always a factor, but added: “Nerves are natural, but you just say to yourself, when you step out onto that field, this is who you are and this is what you do. You have to go out and deliver a performance because that is what you have been trusted to do.”

Andrew also noted that the team, as a collective, learned a lot from playing Cork in both the league final and the Munster round-robin match. 

“We were just confident as a group that we’d perform and get a good result. That 10-minute period after half-time was the crucial moment, pegging back the six-point deficit. You know, if Cork go seven, eight, nine points ahead, that Cork team is going to be very hard to stop. So we worked very hard for each other in that period after half-time to get back in the match.”

As Tipperary supporters reflect on this season, they will rejoice in the emergence of Andrew Ormond as a forward of substance in his breakthrough year. 

No one had Tipperary picked to be All-Ireland champions at the start of the year, and in many ways, Ormond’s journey is a microcosm of their story: an unlikely hero emerging through hard work, opportunity, and sheer self-determination. 

In the end, it was self-belief that carried him, shaping moments on the pitch and leaving an indelible mark on a season that will be remembered fondly by Tipperary people for generations to come.

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