Liam Cahill returns to the sideline in Walsh Park with his team in a fragile state, having received a bracing reminder of their current standing in the world.
Cahill sounded like a beaten man when speaking to reporters in the aftermath of Tipperary's loss in Limerick, a secondary school teacher at the end of his tether. A man who had just confronted the futility of his cause.
Managers sometimes slump into this despondent and fatalistic tone when their season is over. It was somewhat disconcerting to hear it after match one of a four-game series.
The Tipp manager even embraced his inner kneejerk Hogan Stand commenter by touting wholesale changes the next day.
As it was, when the team was released on Friday, it showed the same starting XV, for whatever that's worth. Either Cahill has calmed down in the meantime or this was just the usual dummy team mis-direction.
Losing away to Limerick in the 2020s wouldn't ordinarily be a cause for an emergency root and branch review. However, it was hardly peak Limerick they were facing - in the first half at any rate.
An odd hush had descended over the Gaelic Grounds in the opening half, as often happens in a game where both teams are blasting an abnormal number of wides. Limerick fans might have been accustomed to that in the before times but for current season ticket holders it wasn't thought part of the prospectus.
Alas for Tipp, they were afflicted by the same syndrome, Jason Forde missing almost as many frees as Diarmaid Byrnes at the other end, with a couple of goals chances also butchered.
Throughout it all, Cahill's reactions on the sideline suggested the riot act was recited in full in the dressing room afterwards. Photographers captured him exploding like Logan Roy after one missed goal chance in the first half.
"Again, our energy levels, I cannot understand it," Cahill sighed. "We just seem to be that little bit off the pace. I'm looking in at a team that were just hurling in hope."
And then for the bit that has attracted the most commentary.
In the midst of his weary debrief, Cahill opted to take an oddly gratuitous swipe at Derek McGrath.
"Up to 18 months ago, they were branded as the second best team in the country," the Tipp manager announced of their upcoming opponents, harking back to his own time in the job.
"Their former manager said whoever beats them goes up the steps of the Hogan Stand. The same man, I haven't heard sight nor light of them in the past 18 months."
This drive-by was not skilfully coaxed out of him by the reporters present, no question was leading him down this path.
There was, in the aftermath, considerable bemusement about the motivation for these comments.
Maybe this is the managerial equivalent of the dead cat strategy, to get the commentariat talking about anything other than what they'd just seen?
Or perhaps he was still feeling a touch raw after a sobering loss and was preconditioned to vent his feelings on any issue which strayed across his mind?
To come out with this, unprompted, two years later, suggests it had been nagging at him for some time.
While it was probably just an outburst of giddiness, Cahill may have concluded that McGrath had lined them up for a fall and had heaped further pressure on a group with a reputation for dealing poorly with it.
He wouldn't be the first manager to object to a predecessor issuing a public hostage to fortune. "I don't know why he does stuff like that," Davy Fitz said of Ger Loughnane after the "gutless Galway" comments of 2016, which naturally preceded them ejecting Clare from the championship - and ultimately, Davy from the job.
In the hurling culture war that has raged between the old style hurlin' men and the new age tactical theorists, McGrath is a bit of a bête noire of the former.
The reaction to the now famous joint-homily with Dónal Óg Cusack after the 2019 All-Ireland semi-final - the one where British culture was blamed for aversion to modern tactics in hurling (no postcolonial theorists have run with this idea) - was startling in its ferocity. Clearly, McGrath, with his intellectualism and his tendency to quote Sun Tzu and the latest PhD study he's been devouring, gets the dander up of a certain type of 'no-nonsense' hurling man more than most.
What occurred to Waterford in 2022 remains one of the great mysteries of the hurling championship in recent times.
One of the form teams of the spring - and the previous two years - suddenly dissolved into a puddle mid-season without any obvious explanation.
While the Cork loss was the critical one in the context of the group, the extent of their capitulation in the final match in Ennis was shocking to those who witnessed it. Cahill again sounded resigned on the line and shortly after was gone.
After his inevitable coronation as Tipp boss, Cahill immediately re-energised the team after their write-off year of 2022.
However, the combination of their exuberant league and early Munster form in 2023 and subsequent implosion come knockout championship wound up bolstering the narrative that Cahill's teams gas out late in the season.
Based on the post-Covid years, Cahill's sides have a feast or famine tendency, either tearing over the ground at a rate of knots or else dead on their feet.
This week, they take on a suddenly buoyant Waterford side, enthused at not having flopped on the canvas in the round robin for a change.
Davy Fitz spent much of 2023 painting the team he inherited as a demoralised rabble and longstanding whipping boys, apparently determined to blot the years 2020 and 2021 out of his and everyone else's memory.
Prior to the Cork game, in his second stint, he had presided over 12 games against Liam MacCarthy opposition, winning two, drawing one and losing nine. The wins came against Antrim in last year's league and their rousing, if futile in the short-term, victory over Tipp in the summer.
But now they've turned over Cork and the whole season has opened up for them. "Two wins in a row," as Davy was wont to remind everyone after.
Fitzgerald, from the same school as McGrath, naturally got no credit from the traditionalists from the turnaround, the narrative taking hold that the players must have told him the way things were going to roll from now on.
Cahill had held his tongue in the face of Davy's earlier prodding but on Sunday, took the opportunity to make a pointed comment of his own.
The Waterford players, he said, looked like they'd "gone after a style of play that suited them really well in the past," presumably referring to the scintillating stuff they played under his tenure in the Covid years, a period which Davy Fitz has gone to extreme lengths to memory-hole.
Another barbed comment which adds to the subplot on the sideline, for a game which already has much riding on it, especially for the visitors.
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