CAN TIPPERARY BECOME the next powerful senior dual county in the GAA?

It may be a traditional hurling hotbed but the recent Premier football progress stirs up plenty debate as to how far they can go.

All-Ireland minor champions in 2011, Tipperary next Saturday contest an All-Ireland U21 football final for the first time in their history.

And the Tipperary U21 boss Tommy Toomey passionately believes the county has the capacity to thrive at both with the rise of football posing no threat to hurling.

“I am only interested in sport, in Tipperary players being as good as they can be. There’s a bigger picture. There’s a lot of young lads out there and they want to play.

“There’s no worry to hurling. Hurling will always live in Tipperary, I’ve never seen it not. But we’ve had bleak years when there was no football there. I remember 13, 14 years when we didn’t win a championship match. Football wasn’t to blame then. There was no football there because I was playing wiht the county and we were hardly training.

We’ve to look at ourselves as a county, as a unit, not as a split focus of hurling and football. We’re all GAA, we’re all with the same badge on us, we want to win under this.

“My father won an All Ireland minor hurling medal with Tipperary in 1947. I am a football man but I was brought up with hurling. I am a Tipperary man. I have no axe to grind with hurling, I want hurling to win.

Several well-known Tipperary hurlers cut their teeth in football and Toomey cites this as evidence.

“Brendan Cummins made great press out of playing thirteen senior championship games in football before he played his first senior hurling championship match for Tipperary. Declan Fanning, or Paul Curran, or Paul Kelly, who have won All Ireland senior hurling medals for Tipperary, played football first.

“It did no harm to those players, in fact it made them better players in my opinion. They need to take off the blinkers a small bit, this is the Tipperary brand we are talking about, the more athletes we get fit through strength and conditioning going up along, will help both games.

The one worry I have is that people are trying to split the Tipperary operation to football and hurling and put some kind of divide through the middle of it. I don’t see any divide. I work very closely with Peter Creedon and we work very closely with the county board, the main county board as well as the football board. I’ve never had anything only co-operation from the county board.”

Toomey has also accused national pundits of ‘talking out of two sides of their mouth’ when it comes to assessing the future of the dual player in GAA.

“I admire Cork because Cork seem to give players an opportunity to do both if a player wants to. Taking Aidan Walsh as an example, has his football career helped or hindered him in hurling?

“He played a fantastic game last season in his first hurling championship match and everyone was talking about him as a brilliant hurler and a brilliant footballer. He then had a bad game (against Tipperary) and people began saying if he had been playing hurling all the time that wouldn’t have happened.

People and pundits, in particular, can talk out of the two sides of their mouth when it comes to that, particularly from the hurling agenda. I don’t like it to be quite honest.

“You see the stuff that is going on in Clare at the moment, that’s not happening in Tipperary. If Colin O’Riordan goes off and commits himself to Tipperary senior hurlers, he will get every help from us.

“But Colin is of the opinion that he may be able to do both but at the moment he would rather stay with football and see where that takes him.

“I think that is a courageous decision from that man again and you can see the fruits of it in Tipperary football, if we get a few lads in that are willing to have a go. I see no difference between football and hurling as far as being a GAA person.”

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