All-Ireland champions are blown away in league final by rampant Tribesmen

NOT even the wildest dreams of the most partisan Galway hurling supporters could have imagined what happened at the Gaelic Grounds on Sunday. A league final for which Tipperary were strong favourites to win instead saw the All-Ireland champions humiliated.

That was their unexpected fate after being blown off the park by Galway’s physicality and aggression in a decider which failed miserably to do the occasion justice. The gulf in standard was so great and one team was so superior, it could be no other way.

Tipperary appeared like a group of men who sleep-walked their way to Limerick. It was bad enough that they rolled over in such a high stakes contest, but their camp will have been rocked by such a landslide 16-points defeat ahead of the summer.

Michael Ryan’s charges were mortifyingly poor for a team which was ordained as the best in the land only last September and were earning rave reviews for their league campaign to date. Tipp looked ill-prepared for the intensity Galway brought to the battleground and they paid a heavy price for it.

True, they were missing the injured Seamus Callanan and second-half substitute Patrick ‘Bonner’ Maher is not long back from an army tour of the Golan Heights, but they had the rest of them – only that they were a pale imitation of the squad which had carried all before them in the 2016 championship.

The big question is how much of that was down to their own inertia? Or was it more to do with simply not being able to cope with Galway’s sheer power and tenacity? Tipp are a very pleasing team on the eye, with their wristy-style and slick movement, but they need space to do that . . . and they didn’t get it on Sunday.

In contrast, Galway played out of their skins and though, typically, some local supporters are already trying to qualify their achievement in sweeping to a tenth National League triumph, I have no intention of joining that chorus line.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.