His old teammates had lost as he cursed the decision to axe him. Two years later he had won an All-Ireland and an All-Star award
The 2017 All-Ireland hurling semi-final between Galway and Tipperary was a game for the ages, crowned by Joe Canning’s celestial match-winner from the Cusack touchline.
Meanwhile, Cathal Barrett was stuck in the Hogan Stand, sick to the stomach. The All-Star corner-back was no longer a Tipp panellist, jettisoned by Michael Ryan for “disciplinary reasons” earlier that summer.
“I remember sitting in the stand for 45 minutes after the match,” Barrett recalls. “The two boys I was with, I’d say, were fair depressed, because I was just sitting there, looking out on the pitch. I was so depressed … watching Conor Whelan running around the field and score whatever he scored (0-4 from play), and I was sitting there.”
If he hadn’t been axed, he might have been tracking Whelan. Tipp lost by a point; surely, he could have negated that slimmest of margins?
Still in county exile, Barrett had just returned from a knee injury to resume club action with Holycross-Ballycahill. “I asked Mick to bring me back,” he now confirms, five years on. “I rang him and asked could I meet him. I met him and I just said, ‘Please bring me back. We’re playing Galway, you have to bring me back! I don’t care if you don’t start me, but I can contribute something here.’ But he was just as adamant that he can’t, basically, for one reason or another.”
And so, Barrett sat in an empty stadium long after the final whistle. “I was just so low,” he recounts, “thinking, ‘Jesus, I should have been out there.’ And I was kind of thinking, ‘Jesus, will I ever get back here?’”
But return he did, and two years later, he was an All-Ireland champion for a second time. And now, eight years after announcing himself as the 2014 Young Hurler of the Year, Barrett is just where he wants to be.
On the cusp of championship action, preparing for Walsh Park and Waterford tomorrow, the first leg of a frenzied five-week period incorporating four Munster round-robin matches that will tell us if Tipp are stuck in transition or back in the premier league.
“Love it,” he says without hesitation. “I love driving through, whether it’s Waterford, Limerick, Clare or Cork, seeing the crowds … and seeing the middle fingers up at you!”
Cathal Barrett is chatting away in 65 Degrees, the Cashel coffee bar he jointly runs with business partner Helen Lanigan. The old adage, ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’ springs to mind: Barrett previously worked as an electrical engineer before switching careers to become a primary school teacher in the local St John the Baptist BNS. “Love it,” he says of life in the classroom. “Tough going but good craic.”
Fair to surmise, he’d say something very similar about his other ‘full-time’ occupation as a county hurler.
Barrett is among his generation’s standout markers, yet his career has been a series of operatic highs and lows, coruscating displays and controversies. The fortunes of Tipp have similarly oscillated; even though Barrett was rock-steady in this year’s league, they finished fourth in Division 1 Group B – and summer expectations have rarely been so low.
“We are where we finished last year. Fourth, fifth or wherever,” he surmises. “I wouldn’t say we’re at the bottom of the pile; I wouldn’t say we’re at the top of the pile either. Probably in the middle, and it’s up to us to put the whole thing together and catch up.”
But he has enjoyed the training-ground vibe during Colm Bonnar’s maiden campaign, especially now with Covid restrictions lifted. And he’s adamant that even if Limerick remain the benchmark, they are beatable.
“Absolutely, every team is,” he declares. “And to be honest, if I didn’t think they were, I wouldn’t bother my hole training either.”
But he is still bothering, just as hard as when Eamon O’Shea promoted the 20-year-old to his senior set-up. “If you look at a picture of me at the 2014 All-Ireland final, I’m a whippet. I’m smaller than minors are now … I was so skinny,” he admits.
“I relied on my pace and instincts – and my mentality, really. I didn’t find it easy, but I didn’t give a f*** who I marked either. I remember leading up to the (2014) league final, Eamon said to me they’re probably going to put Henry Shefflin on you. My reply was, ‘Sure, I’m not going to ask him for his f****** autograph.’
“Now, that’s not to say I still wasn’t nervous … sure, they’re all class players, but I still have my job to do. I relished marking them, too. I got to mark savage players in the first year.”
He brought the same cussed attitude to training. If he could keep up with Paudie Maher or Shane McGrath in the runs, he was doing OK. “I just went to the gym and lifted whatever Paudie Maher was lifting. If I was able to lift it or not, I didn’t give a f***. I just said I’d give it a go … and in fairness, my body responded massively to that.”
Hawk-Eye broke their hearts in the drawn final of ’14. Two years later came sweet revenge against Kilkenny. Ryan had stepped up from selector to manager, bringing “massive continuity” but also “a bit more rawness”. Barrett’s first Celtic Cross was followed by a maiden All-Star.
But then, in 2017, it all went belly-up.
Barrett suffered knee ligament damage as they crashed out of Munster against Cork. Nine days later, he was axed from the panel.
Without wishing to delve too deeply into that episode, Barrett says he didn’t break any Monday socialising curfew after the Cork defeat (he was having a scan), but he went out with clubmates the next weekend. “I was in a brace. I wasn’t going to be hurling for two months,” he points out.
The late-night trouble that followed, he insists, was a case of “wrong place, wrong time. But he (Ryan) used that to send a message to the rest of the group that, basically, if he’s going to drop Cathal Barrett, then he has no problem dropping anyone else. But it was handy, in a way, because I was injured, so he wasn’t really losing me.”
Barrett didn’t agree with the decision, but facing injury rehab on his own, he resolved to make any sacrifices needed to force his way back.
Did he blame management or himself? “Both,” he replies. “I was hating Mick, obviously, but I was thick with myself too – because, at the end of the day, I put myself in that position, so I have to take responsibility for where I am as well. I was 100pc thick with them – and I still would be annoyed over it. Now, I still get on great with the boys and I talk away no bother.”
Barrett was reinstated for the 2018 season and with that came a new position – midfield. He enjoyed it, even while worrying about leakage in defence and whether he should be back there.
But that summer – the first iteration of the new provincial round-robin series – proved a collective disaster. “The management were trying different things and it just wasn’t working. It wasn’t working from their end; it wasn’t working from our end. It felt just pure stale,” he concludes.
Re-enter Liam Sheedy.
Barrett had never played under Sheedy but did broach the subject during a half-jokey chat at Conor O’Brien’s wedding. “Shane McGrath was telling me how good a manager he was. And we were having the craic, sneering at each other, and he said, ‘I’d love to manage you!’ And I said, ‘You’re all talk. If you were any good, you’d come back and manage me!’”
And then it happened.
“If he told you to jump, you’d nearly ask him, how high?” Barrett explains. “He commanded massive respect, and whenever he’d speak, you’d listen. And if you didn’t listen, you’d probably get a punch into the chest! So, even if you didn’t like him, you’d still respect him. You’d respond to him. He’s such a driven man, and you couldn’t but respond to that energy.”
Sheedy’s second coming began in a blaze of glory. For Barrett, too, it was a second Celtic Cross – but this one was “probably the sweetest”.
“I know your first is always your first, but in ’19, I had so many barriers leading up to that, and I got this name, whether it was good, bad or indifferent … and then to bounce back and almost prove whoever I needed to prove wrong, and to come out on top and to win an All-Star, it was almost like a weight off my shoulders.”
A case of having to prove yourself all over again?
“One hundred per cent,” he agrees. “Because, unfortunately, these kind of people can write whatever they want … and, like, I’d read everything as well.”
Not that the social-media barbs ceased in victory, Barrett shipping flak – from Noreside especially – for his role as the recipient of Richie Hogan’s red-card tackle (“I didn’t send him off!” he reminds) and also for his earlier foul on the Kilkenny man (“I went for the ball,” he protests).
“You have people probably say you were play-acting, but actually, the doctor wouldn’t allow me to move,” he goes on. “I was sore, like. I wasn’t sore enough that I had to go off, but the doctor has to do those bloody five questions.”
On the issue of online abuse, some unknown keyboard warrior making “an outrageous comment about me on Twitter” doesn’t bother him.
“But I’ll use that – I like to know as well,” he confides. “The only people whose opinion matters to me are friends, family, people I hurl with, colleagues, or people I know and they actually know me. Other than that, it’s irrelevant to me … why should I care what (somebody) walking down the street in Kilkenny has to say about me? It’s only a game of hurling, at the end of the day. I’ve 100 different things in life to be doing.”
Post-2019, as Limerick morphed into a force of nature, Tipperary have fallen off the pace, consecutive quarter-final exits culminating in Sheedy’s resignation.
Barrett reckons the scheduling disruptions caused by Covid in 2020 proved “an absolute disaster” as Tipp burned themselves out. “I just think we got it wrong,” he surmises. “I’ve never been as fit, but we were so flat.”
Mind you, he still struggles to comprehend his pivotal sending-off – midway through the second half of their qualifier against Galway. Whatever about his second card, he “couldn’t believe” the first yellow.
This and other bookings have prompted laments in Tipp that referees were coming down unduly hard on Barrett since the Hogan saga.
“It’s corner-backs in general, but I think there was definitely a small little bit of extra attention paid to me. I don’t know is it because of the way I play or what, or because of other things off the field … but I seem to have developed a name as a dirty hurler almost,” he says.
“Sure, I never flaked anyone in my life. I don’t open my mouth to people on the field. I just get on with it. So, it’s a confusing one – I don’t really understand it. Like, obviously, I’m wiry as f***! But that’s the way I play the game. I’m wiry. But I’m not going out to hurt anyone either.”
By the time Barrett turns 29 in July, the 2022 race for ‘Liam’ will have concluded. Hard to believe, but he is setting out on a ninth championship. He is now one of the senior statesmen. “It’s weird,” he reflects.
“But I’ve zero intention (of quitting) because I’ve more to do. Like, I’ve way more to do.”
