John McGrath stepped through sliding doors to promised land

By John Harrington

Back at the start of April, the idea that John McGrath would finish the year with a Celtic Cross in his back pocket and also pick up the PwC GAA/GPA Hurler of the Month award for July would have been a far-fetched one.

Tipperary weren’t widely regarded as serious challengers for the Liam MacCarthy Cup and McGrath certainly didn’t look primed to score the seven goals and 16 championship points from play that have put him in the conversation for Hurler of the Year.

He hadn’t started a match for Tipperary since the first round of the 2023 Munster SHC, and there was a feeling at large that the Loughmore-Castliney player had never been quite the same since rupturing his Achilles in 2022.

He didn’t play a single minute of Tipperary’s last two league games against Clare and then Cork in the final, so it was something of a selection rabbit from the hat when Liam Cahill named him to start him in first round of the Munster SHC against Limerick.

Even McGrath himself was surprised, but also very determined to make the most of what in hindsight now looks like a real sliding doors moment both for the player himself and Tipperary as a team.

He scored two spectacular goals and a point that helped earn Tipperary a draw that gave them the self-belief they were good enough to mix it with the best again.

"Even before I had the injury, my form was up and down a little bit for a year or two,” says McGrath.

“The club form was one of the huge things that kept me going. In the back of your mind, you know it's there.

"I saw very little league time. It's not as if I was tearing up trees at the time in training either. The lads took a small little bit of a chance on me coming into that Limerick game.

"They said 'we're putting you in, you've been there, you have that little bit of experience.'

"I probably put a lot of pressure on myself in that game. As you say, it was a sliding doors moment. I probably made it out to be a bigger game in my own head than it was. The couple of previous years I had had been a bit on and off - and off more than on.

"I realised that match was going to be a huge moment in the stage of my Tipperary career that I was at, I kinda needed to do something to remind myself maybe and others what I was capable of.

"Thank God, it kind of worked out for me that day. To be back stuck in it at that stage, it's something you don't want to let go of.

“You certainly gain a little bit of confidence from it. By no means was it the best game I ever played, but I think moreso it was a right battle that day and I felt physically I was at the pitch of it and getting rightly stuck into it and I didn't feel like I was lagging behind or under pressure.

“I felt I was right at the pitch of a good, intense Munster Championship match so that certainly brough a huge confidence for me coming on into the next few games.

“The way it finished up with me getting two goals in the second half, it does give you a boost I suppose. Not that I ever doubted what I had, but I was certainly tested on it in the previous two years. It does play on your mind a little bit and it's frustrating when you're not involved having been used to being quite involved for a good few years.

“That first performance I probably put a lot of emphasis on it and got the rewards out of it as the year went on.”

McGrath’s year was a microcosm of the Tipperary team’s as a whole. They didn’t emerge from the pack to win an All-Ireland this year, they weren’t even in the pack after a disastrous 2024 Munster SHC campaign that saw them fail to win a single match.

Did the players themselves believe they could rise from the ashes of that failure as impressively as they ultimately did this year?

"It's always in the back of your mind," McGrath says. "You certainly have a belief somewhere in you or I don't think you'd ever get to a stage of winning anything.

"But mainly, we wanted to get competitive, first and foremost. Whatever comes from that, comes from it. We just needed to build ourselves back up.

"We were losing games by double digits. More than once. It was about getting back to being competitive.

"From that point of view, to where the year actually developed, it certainly is in some ways hard to believe. I'm living in Thurles and you're going down the town and the flags and colour are still up and in some ways, it feels like a bit of a dream. There's huge satisfaction.

"After the last couple of years, a lot of lads could easily have let the thing slip by a little bit. But I think we had a good bit of pride in ourselves. You want to be competing. We weren't happy looking at everyone else competing for trophies over the last couple of years."

If Tipperary’s progress to the All-Ireland Final was an unlikely story, then the crescendo their campaign ended with on the day itself was nigh unbelievable.

You know the story by now. Trailing by six points at half-time they outscored Cork by 3-14 to 0-2 in a second half of hurling that was the most sublime ever produced by a team on the biggest day of all.

McGrath scored two of those goals and won the penalty for the third as his own redemption story ended with a Hollywood blockbuster final act.

“The manner in which we won it, I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would have come up with that scenario,” he says.

"There certainly was an element of shock. I knew we were relatively well up but to actually see the final score, it was kinda hard to believe that that had just happened.

"Sport is funny like that. Everything just started to go right for us at a certain point of that second half. And the exact opposite for Cork at different stages - hitting the post, hitting the crossbar. Them little bits of luck are needed along the way.

"But our lads just absolutely powered into that last 35 minutes. To save the best 35 minutes of the year for that time in an All-Ireland final... It's the kind of thing that you hope is going to happen. But how often does that actually come to fruition? It's unreal from that point of view."

So, what now for this Tipperary hurling team? Will the 2025 bolt from the blue and gold presage more success in the coming years? How determined are the players themselves to prove it wasn’t a flash in the pan season?

“As the year ticks on and it gets into the winter, those sorts of thoughts will be coming to lads,” says McGrath. “You certainly don’t want to just win one and go away for a couple of years again.

“Like Tipp, we want and aim to be very competitive every year. That’s not always going to lead to winning Munster Championships or All-Ireland Championships or League finals, but on any given year, Tipp should feel that there’s a real chance.

“It’s probably for a couple of weeks and months down the line when that kind of talk starts up. We wanted to enjoy the year we had and to celebrate that when we had the chance.”