For the first time in seven weeks they haven't a match.

They had got into a groove there, a routine of match, ice bath straight after, swim and rub the following morning in the Horse and Jockey, light puckaround on Wednesday and then game again. Everyone kept saying to him they must be tired, but Eamonn Corcoran kept telling them he wasn't. In the Premiership they play every weekend; sure, even in the league Tipp were nearly out every week out as well. They've been training since November, so fitness hasn't been a problem. And mentally? Mentally, it's been the best thing that could have happened for the group.

"Playing week after week, you're not as nervous, " he explains. "First round of championship, you're waiting three or four months for it; all you're thinking is Limerick, Limerick, Limerick.

Then, if you win that, it's another few weeks thinking of Cork or Waterford. Now matches are coming on top of you all the time. After a bad performance you're not dwelling on it. You have the next week to rectify it."

All around him these past few weeks he's seen men grow. Like Conor O'Mahony with the few overhead balls he plucked down against Offaly. Like Declan Fanning, who once was just a team regular but is now a team leader. Seamus Butler is more vocal too. Instead of being a tad fazed by the big occasion, they've become accustomed to it.

And then there are the young fellas. Eamonn Buckley is playing as if he's been Tipp's number two for a decade. Alan Byrne came into the other corner against Cork as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Outside him, Shane Maher slotted in seamlessly, while up the field, the likes of Darragh Hickey and Willie O'Dwyer did too.

"That was the key to the Cork game, " says Corcoran.

"Before that a lot of those lads weren't making the first 15. People have kept asking, 'Where did that performance come from?' That's where it came from . . . competition for places. We've had an injury list this year probably worse than Tyrone's. But from the start every player on the panel was given games in the league. No one was coming in starting from scratch."

Whatever else happens this year, and whatever happens to him after it, Babs Keating's policy of blooding youngsters this season will stand to Tipp, but perhaps the finest achievement of Keating's second coming has been how he's facilitated the second coming of Corcoran.

At 30, Corcoran's been essentially a younger man's Tony Browne, and only for Browne, would now be in poll position for a second consecutive All Star. Yet only two years ago, Corcoran was on the verge of walking away from the intercounty game.

"I really was. I wasn't enjoying my hurling and wasn't as disciplined as I should have been. I probably took my eye off the ball there for a few years, trying to get away with one or two pints at the weekend or eating fries in the morning. That all tells on the field and after 2005 it was telling me to pack it all in."

The fact he'd played most of that season out of position had fuelled much of that disillusionment. On the eve of that championship, Ken Hogan found himself with a surplus of half backs and a dearth of corner backs and one night in training tried Corcoran in the corner. Corcoran acquitted himself well, or "too well" as he now jokes, and the following night hit a good bit of ball from there again. It was no preparation for playing there in a Munster final on Joe Deane. Never in the last four years was Deane serviced with more ball than he was that day. It wasn't just that his teammates knew he was lethal, but because they knew he had a mis-match.

For a player of Corcoran's standing, it was a shattering predicament to be in.

"I'll never forget it, " winces Corcoran. "There seemed to be this massive gap between us and everyone else, and it was like all the Cork lads were looking into his eyes, picking him out. I remember one ball went out in front of him and he hit it over my head. Point.

Next ball, I pushed out, it went over the two of us, one touch from him, bang, over the bar. I didn't know how to play there.

"You look at Eamonn Buckley. He plays the spot to a tee; he has the positional sense, he's a man marker and that's it. Or Benny Dunne; I have massive respect for that man because he can play anywhere. At wing back you play from the front, you read the game. In the corner you usually play from the front. I was in the corner wanting to hit ball.

I'd play anywhere for Ken Hogan and for Tipp, but corner back wasn't a position I was comfortable in.

"In fairness to Babs, he understood that. He actually said it in a meeting inside early on, 'Look, you're not related to a corner back, so relax, you're not playing there.' If I couldn't play wing back I wasn't good enough for it anymore and when they took over, Babs, John [Leahy] and Tom [Barry] told me I should still be good enough for it for a few more years. I took a lot of confidence from that."

If it was Keating that gave Corcoran the vision he could recapture his form of his early twenties, then it Brian Murray, his trainer, that gave Corcoran the plan to realise it. After the Cork game, Keating paid tribute to the "6 am work Brian has put in with these players." Corcoran would have been one of his biggest projects, working on his diet and pace.

It was rewarded with a trip to Singapore in January for Corcoran as an All-Star replacement only days after coming home from his honeymoon with Deirdre, but AllStar trips aren't the kind of perk Corcoran's still playing the game for. At the start of 2002 Tipp were in South Africa. Apart from a training camp in Portugal a few years ago, they haven't been away since. To go somewhere with the men you sweated and won an All Ireland with, is the trip he dreams of.

There are few survivors from South Africa now. Last week, against Cork, himself and Lar Corbett were the only starters from the 2001 final.

Sometimes he finds himself shaking his head, wondering how time has flown and how little they've won.

"I remember John Leahy saying to us after we won in 2001, 'If you think it's just going to happen again next year or the year after, you're wrong. I made that mistake after '91.' We just haven't been consistent enough since.

We've played well for patches in most of our games, no one has ever beaten us easy, but it's putting it together for longer."

That's what was so satisfying about the Cork game.

Last Saturday week when Cork rallied, Tipp withstood the backlash.

"We took huge heart from that and the fact the real Tipp support was there. At times you thought there was 50,000 there, not 15,000. When we went into the tunnel at halftime, they were standing up.

That was the first time in a long time I'd seen that. But once we woke up the following morning it was over. The reality is we're only as far as we got last year.

"Wexford is a desperately dangerous game for us.

They're exactly where we were going into the Cork game. The TV already had it splashed up that we were playing Waterford and we took exception to that and the Wexford boys will take exception to what's been said about them since the Leinster final. We played them twice in challenge games this year and in one of them they beat us.

"If we let them hurl, they'll beat us, but we also know that if we click we're as good a team as there is in the country. There's been a lot of bullshit about the camp not being united but the spirit in there has been great. I wouldn't still be in there if it wasn't."

And they wouldn't be in this position if it wasn't for him.