SIX points was the margin — just as it had been when Tipperary beat Kilkenny by 0-17 to 1-8 in March in the league.
But there could not have been a soul in Croke Park who felt that there was anything more than a whisker between the sides in yesterday’s thrilling Glen Dimplex All-Ireland senior quarter-final.
Tipp earned a semi-final date with Galway after 80 minutes of action, plus injury time — with the game decided by the two moments where the ball hit the net.
There was Clodagh McIntyre’s stunning strike just before the extra-time interval.
And a disallowed goal from Caoimhe Keher Murtagh which was chopped off because referee Ray Kelly had blown his whistle for a foul.
The subsequent penalty from Aoife Prendergast was saved by Laura Leenane — and Tipp never looked back.
Praising his keeper, and fullback Mairéad Eviston who blocked a goal-bound effort from Keher Murtagh, Tipperary manager Denis Kelly said: “I’ll definitely be sending Ray a Christmas card for that one.
“Look, they fall for you at times. I thought we were possibly goosed if that went in.
“Laura’s been a huge find. We lost Nicole Walsh, who retired, so we needed someone to fill the boots and she’s definitely done that. That was a huge save, as was Mairéad’s. All these things add up at the end of it, it’s another game of inches.”
It was a game of inches because of how Kilkenny put the shackles on a free-scoring Tipp attack, holding the Premier County to 0-16 in the hour.
Much of this was down to Tommy Shefflin deploying Maria Brennan as an extra defender, with Katie Power and Laura Murphy doing the work of three players to compensate at the other end.
Shefflin said: “We brought Maria back as sweeper and just encouraged them to use the ball.
“When you’re playing with five forwards you have to have good ball going in and in fairness to Katie Power, she got three wonderful scores in the first half when she was outnumbered.
“It’s not a traditional thing for Kilkenny to play with a sweeper so we went against the curve with that. But we didn’t want to come up here and leave ourselves wide open, maybe going a goal or two down after five or ten minutes.
We wanted to stay in the match as long as we could to take belief from that, then to push up and attack the game with a few minutes to go to try and win it.”
MORE QUARTER-FINAL HEARTBREAK
On paper, it is another quarter-final exit for Kilkenny. But the mood in the Marble County will be very different to that at this stage 12 months ago when they were knocked out by Dublin.
Shefflin added: “We asked them for one thing — to give us something on the line that we can jump up and down, encourage each other, and to give the crowd something as well.
“The hooks, the blocks, the turnovers, at half-time we had 29 turnovers so that tells its own story. We couldn’t have asked for anymore.
“They won the minor as well, so there is a huge future there for Kilkenny. It’s going to take time but the big thing is that the girls have to believe that they can get back up there.
“It’s tight margins at this stage of the Championship, there was a tight call today and that was what proved to be the difference.
“It was a tough year. We started the league with three defeats but the girls had to respond and we beat Waterford and Dublin to stay in Division 1.
“Then we won the Leinster Championship, we went on to play the All-Ireland series and had two tough days against Waterford and Galway, but we got a response from them each day.
“We’ve said it all along that they’re well able to hurl, it’s just about that bit of belief. Hopefully they’ll take belief from that today and that’ll drive them on.”
TACTICAL MASTERCLASS
Kelly, too, acknowledged that Kilkenny’s set-up caused them some headaches, and noted that it was only after they were able to make adjustments at half-time that they found their feet.
He added: “We let that extra woman dictate for our puckouts, she was sitting in a pocket of space and we didn’t adapt that well.
“At half-time, we restructured that and we just decided to switch sides and get people into space a little bit more, pushing Karen Kennedy to centre-forward.”
TIPPERARY: L Leenane; M Eviston, K Blair, E Loughman; N Costigan, C McCarthy 0-3, S Corcoran; K Kennedy, C Maher 0-1; R Howard 0-1, M Burke 0-1, E Heffernan 0-1; C McIntyre 1-0, C Hennessy 0-3, G O’Brien 0-9 8f.
Subs: J Bourke for Costigan 23mins; J Kelly 0-3 for Burke 46; L Purcell for McIntyre 48; N Cunneen for Howard 60+2; McIntyre for Purcell f-t; Howard for Heffernan 79; E Cunneen for Hennessy 80.
KILKENNY: A Norris; M Teehan, T Fitzgerald, D Quigley; K Doyle, N Deely, C Dowling; A O’Gorman, L Greene 0-2; S Fitzgerald, L Murphy 0-5, M O’Connell; A Prendergast 0-7 4f, K Power 0-4, M Brennan.
Subs: C Keher Murtagh for O’Connell h-t; S Barcoe 0-1 for O’Gorman 50mins; S Holden for Doyle 58; K Nolan for Brennan 67; S O’Dwyer for Power 74.
REFEREE: R Kelly (Kildare).
