Originally posted by Cul Cat :

You are about to witness the second coming of Nicky English.
Head for the Bookies now.
I put that bet down last March.

Originally posted by Cul Cat :

I have watched the development of this Tipperary team over the past five or six years. The team originated from three good minor teams with a few old hands like Eoin Kelly,Brendan Cummins and Lar Corbett giving them experience.
Tipp began building up momentum from around 2008 onwards and put in good seasons in 08 and 09 losing classic league and All Ireland finals that year.
Tipp weren’t as good in 2010 as they were in 2009. Cork beat them well in the Munster championship and that was the day I began to put a question mark over this squad.
The reaction of the players after that game was poor, with very few of the players coming back home on the team bus that evening. A meeting with Sheedy and the selectors the following Tuesday didn’t inspire confidence as the response from the players was muted enough.
A favourable draw in the qualifiers was the break Sheedy and Co. needed to rebuild their confidence for the remainder of the championship. The semi final win over Galway was lucky enough with the men in Maroon missing a couple of chances in the closing 10 minutes to put Tipp away and the injury to Canning unsettling the Tribesmen defence. In fairness to Tipp they took their chance and edged it. That win was total redemption for the Cork defeat.
The final took care of itself and Tipperary totally deserved their win over Kilkenny in the 2010 final.
Liam Sheedy and his backroom team did more to win the All Ireland in 2010 than the players. It was the management team that dragged the panel along through the championship after the defeat to Cork.
The message to me from that 2010 season was that without the fatherly figure of that Sheedy management team this squad would suffer and probably struggle a bit.
Another thing that didn’t help in 2011 was that the Tipp supporters continued to harp on about the Richie Power penalty of 2009 and that Tipp should have won and should be going for three – in – a – row in 2011.
Tipperary came into that All Ireland final believing that Tipperary had moved on (a la Kilkenny in 2008) and the ‘old legs’ of Kilkenny were being left behind in the slip stream of this Tipp team’s development. After all they had put seven goals past Waterford in the Munster final, Eoin Kelly was fully fit, Corbett was buzzing and the young guns had tasted defeat and victory in successive All Ireland finals. This team was becoming unbeatable and they had taken forward play to a new level. The 2011 All Ireland final would merely confirm the changing of the guard.
What was totally overlooked by most observers and journalists in the build up to the 2011 final was the unbelievable character that runs throughout this Kilkenny squad. When Brian Cody says that the desire to win comes from within the players, he’s not joking. Cody has created the atmosphere and the boundaries for the players to take ownership of their performance and the players respond. The players demand this from each other.
The 2011 All Ireland final was won as comprehensively by Kilkenny as one could ever have envisaged. Tipp were never in the game.
Declan Ryan was blamed, everyone was at fault but the facts were simple the Tipperary team didn’t perform because they lacked the maturity to expect and stand up to the challenge that was posed to them.
2012 has been a series of sideshows for Tipperary. Lar Corbett retires. Lar Corbett returns. Tipperary never convinced me this year. They were like a horse that was at the races but he didn’t want to gallop.
I wondered about the choice of team captain and the choice of team captain. I wondered about the lack of meaningful game time for sub goalkeeper Gleeson. The new defenders didn’t appear to be an improvement on what was there the previous year. Midfield wasn’t hitting form and the forwards were scoring when ‘Bonnar’ Maher handed them the ball. Then there was the shadow of ‘Lar’. He returned. His club knew nothing about it the hurling public hadn’t a clue it was going to happen. Then Lar is a columnist on the Irish Independent. The retirement and the return didn’t sit right. That’s just my instinct.
His performance against Waterford in the Munster final was very individual and it appeared to me that he was playing to the crowd.
Last Sunday’s tactics, how did they come about?
We’ll probably never fully know the story.During the week before the game I was told that Lar didn’t want to be playing on Jackie Tyrrell after last year’s experience. I found that odd and contrasted it to Noel Hickey and his burning desire to play on Brian Corcoran again after a hard time in the 2004 All Ireland final. Noel didn’t want to play on anyone else in the 2006 All Ireland final.
Looking at the hurling career and the personality of Declan Ryan over the past 30 years what transpired in the name of ‘tactics’ against Kilkenny is totally alien to the man. I don’t know where this charade came from but I can’t believe it is in Declan Ryan’s make up. There is nothing in his three decades as a hurler and a team manager to suggest that he could have hatched such a tactic.
That brings me to the question, who was running the show?
I had formed the opinion some months ago that this management team wasn’t in total control. A loss of control is the main criticism that can be leveled at this management team. But it’s worth remembering that it took Liam Sheedy and his selectors all their man management abilities to keep the ship on an even keel also.
This might sound unthinkable but for this Tipperary team to develop they will have to face 2013 without the trio of Cummins, Kelly and Corbett. They have to start building a team around Pauric Maher, Brendan Maher, ‘Bonner’ Maher and Noel McGrath and let them stand on their own two feet. Tipperary have loads of good hurlers and they will come again.
You are about to witness the second coming of Nicky English.
Head for the Bookies now.
I put that bet down last March.

Originally posted by Yojimbo:

I hope if it is to be Nicky that he's prepared to commit to a five year term, even if its only an initial two year term.
We need somebody that is in it for the long haul, especially with the talent we currently have at our disposal: You can't blame either Nicky or Liam Sheedy for prioritising their personal affairs, because a county senior hurling manager position is one of the most thankless jobs in Ireland, and particularly manager of a 'traditional' hurling county.You didn't have to read between the lines of Nicky's Irish Times column, yesterday, to know how he felt about Sunday's 'performance', and hopefully this will spur him on.
There is the talent, there, and there were at least two or three members of the current minor team who should be graduating soon to the senior ranks, so time will be on his side.Agreed about 'the Lar tactic' being totally out of character for Declan, but then there's been so much talk in recent years about the effectiveness of particular tactics, that I can understand why he might have gotten 'sucked in'