Eoghan Connolly happy with Tipperary's tactics

​By Paul Keane

It will go down as one of the great All-Ireland hurling final tactical tweaks, Tipperary's decision to play with a seventh defender.

It certainly paid off handsomely at Croke Park yesterday, Bryan O'Mara taking up the role initially before swapping out with Craig Morgan in the second-half.

In the end, Cork only managed to add a single goal to the 17 they'd previously scored in the Championship and Tipp made off with the MacCarthy Cup, the first time they'd done that since 2019.

It turns out that only a week before the final, however, Tipp were more at sixes and sevens than being in seventh heaven with the defensively minded tactic.

Speaking at Tipperary's team hotel base in Malahide, ahead of this evening's homecoming, defender Eoghan Connolly revealed just how much they struggled to adapt to the change initially.

"We actually trained last weekend and it didn't actually work out for us, we had a terrible game in-house, an A versus B," said Connolly. "But we got our match-ups right on Sunday and thankfully got the result."

Remarkably, the A team that went on to win the All-Ireland a week later didn't just lose that in-house game to the Bs, they were well beaten.

"Oh absolutely, by an awful score as well," said Connolly, one of the stars on final day. "There was wicked heat inside in Thurles for it and it was probably our first time playing with a plus-one in a long time, since the Clare game I think, so it just took us a while to get to grips with it.

"But even by last Friday evening we were training and we couldn't get enough of it."

To accommodate O'Mara being deployed as the spare defender, midfielder Willie Connors dropped back to wing-back, picking up Declan Dalton, and Sam O'Farrell, wearing number 12, played at midfield next to Conor Stakelum.

The Stakelum versus Tim O'Mahony battle was another predetermined head-to-head, as was the decision to put captain Ronan Maher on Hurler of the Year contender Brian Hayes, the placement of Connolly himself on Diarmuid Healy, Michael Breen on Patrick Horgan and a whole host more one-on-ones which all seemed to work out.

"Liam Cahill and Mikey Bevans put in massive work in the background, we just got told last week as to what you were going after," explained Connolly.

And yet the management could just as easily have figured that they needed to rip up the script after that A versus B game.

"No, not at all," said Connolly, when asked if there were any doubts at that stage. "I have been involved since 2021 and I've been on the B teams for a few years of that. The competition is huge, those boys are mad for a jersey as well. They are all so competitive that it just drives everybody's standards that bit higher.

"You'd find yourself on different players. I think Joe Fogarty of Moneygall was the man I was on. He's sick, he's actually a carbon copy of Seamus Harnedy. I got an awful licking off him, I was even half-worried as to what my form was like, to be honest."