By John Harrington

Tipperary football manager Liam Kearns will have a significantly stronger panel of players in 2017 than he did this year.

Former captain Paddy Codd is set to return after taking a year out, while Jason Lonergan, Liam Casey, and Kevin Fahy will also be back after they made the ill-fated decision to leave the panel after the Allianz League and travel to the USA.

“I have with some, and yeah most of them will be coming back,” says Kearns. “The guys who were in America; they’ll all be back. Paddy Codd will be back and there’s others indicated that they are going to be involved as well, so we are going to have a stronger panel alright, definitely.

“But Peter Acheson is in Dubai, that’s a big one. We’ll see if he will come back for the championship, that’s a conversation that has to happen yet, but we don’t know.

“He may be staying over there, we’re not sure. He’s kind of one of those irreplaceable guys.”

On paper at least the All-Ireland semi-finalists should be stronger next year, but Kearns admits the return of the panel’s prodigal sons might upset its harmony.

“There is a danger, yeah,” he says. “There is always is that because we worked off 15, we had 15 out there who had a very good understanding and there was a lot of coaching done with them so they all knew their job well and knew what they were about.

“Whereas we are going to have 10-plus extra players in who have to fit into the whole scheme of things and team bonding and all of that stuff has to be worked on with them.

“So to answer your question, there is a danger but we have to try and guard against that I suppose. We have to get the right characters in, they’ll have to buy into the team and buy into the squad and buy into what we are about. If they are not, we have to kind of protect it anyway as best we can.”

Tipperary were very much the surprise package of this year’s championship, but Kearns knows they’ll have a target on their backs next year because teams will be much more aware of the threat they pose.

“We have potential but whether we can fulfil the potential now…and it’s also about the element of surprise is gone now and there will be a target on our back, so we’ll have to improve if we want to go on,” he says.

“I think we will improve as a team, but whether we step up enough to get back to where we were. We set a fair high bar now so it depends on us showing the necessary improvement to step up to the next level. That’s what we’ll have to do really.”

Kearns believes the first step on the journey to making that improvement will be a successful campaign in Division Three of the Allianz NFL next year.

“Look, we set out long-term goals, promotion was one, we didn’t get that so there’s a goal straight away,” he says. “We have to try and get back to a Munster Final now. Another goal was to be one of the big two and we beat Cork, so now I suppose we have to try and beat Kerry.

“Back to a Munster final is the next thing and the last eight again; we know where to go after this year really. We set those kind of targets and it will be a question of if we can back up what we did this year.

“It will be hard, it will be difficult but that’s the challenge now isn’t it?”