LAST August in Croke Park as John Mullane and Davy Fitzgerald rolled along the ground like two loved-up teenagers, Eamonn Corcoran slumped to the same Croke Park turf before lifting his head and looking around the big cathedral.

This was it. The most enjoyable season he'd had since the All Ireland-winning year of '01 had come to an end. His career had probably come to an end. And too many days in that career had ended like this: losing in Croke Park.

There was a time when Croke Park was Tipperary's second home. After losing the 1924 All Ireland final to Galway by a point, Tipp didn't lose there for another 36 years, winning 11 successive championship games in the intervening years, including seven All Ireland finals.

Now Corcoran and Tipp had just lost their fifth consecutive championship game in Croker. In fact it meant that since winning the All Ireland in '01, his only wins there since had been against Antrim and Offaly. The defeat galled Corcoran, because this time Tipp seemed ready to win. Other years their form in the league and Munster had been too patchy to expect to get to All Ireland finals; it was just a matter of when they'd be exposed: quarter-final or semi-final.

But that's why he feels good about this semi-final against Limerick. Although the record suggests otherwise, it's not like Croker spooks them the way playing in Páirc Uí Chaoimh seemed to haunt Tipp teams in the second half of the '90s when the county went six championship games without a win down by the banks, or Justin's Waterford who repeatedly tripped up in Croker between six-week layoffs and one-week turnarounds and a series of logistical gaffes. Last year excepted, Tipp have kept losing in Croke Park this decade for the simple reason their team hasn't been good enough. Now that they know they're good enough to dominate Munster, they feel they're good enough to win in Croker. They don't have a complex about Croker, at least yet.

During the week Shane McGrath referred to the Croke Park syndrome and this Tipp team's outlook on it. "I think we know what it takes [to win] but winning in Croke Park is another thing. But there are four or five lads who have come in this year off the back of winning All Ireland minors and when they spoke the other night they said, 'We have no qualms about going up to Croke Park. We've won All Irelands in Croke Park. We haven't lost in Croke Park.'"

While Corcoran is no longer part of the Tipp inner circle, he knows it well enough from last year to share McGrath's sentiments. "Croke Park shouldn't really be an issue, when you look at the All Irelands lads have won there either at senior or minor. But it needs to be put to bed against Limerick before it really does become a hang-up. And my gut tells me this year will be different."

That instinct is going on several factors, including the attitude of the panel's younger players that McGrath spoke about.

"When I started out on the panel in '98," says Corcoran, "we were in a team meeting when Len Gaynor asked had I anything to say. I looked around and I saw Declan Ryan, John Leahy and Colm Bonnar and I said, 'Jesus, I'm just glad to be here.' If you said that now you'd be told to turn around and walk out the door. Our first meeting last year a number of the young fellas made it clear they were there to nail down their positions and take our spots. And it wasn't cockiness, just healthy confidence.

"You take Seamus Callanan. He's a real character: lovely, down-to-earth fella who just enjoys his hurling, yet when he wasn't starting in the league last year he wasn't afraid to say, 'Listen, I'm still going to be our centre-forward this year.' And he was. He's backed it up and has brought a different dimension to Tipperary hurling."

That he has. While there have been question marks about his work rate and choice of goal celebrations, it's largely gone unnoticed just how often he's had goals to celebrate. Callanan has now found the net in each of his five championship games. The only other player in the last 40 years to score in five consecutive championship games is Paul Flynn, and they weren't his first five games. Indeed only Rackard, Ring, Doran and Keher in the last 70 years have enjoyed a longer goalscoring streak than Callanan's. Clearly, he has a lot more to do before he enjoys anything like their legendary status, but that he even has some reason to be mentioned among such names gives an idea of just how remarkable his goalscoring prowess is.

Callanan has also come through a system that insists on best practice. In 2006 when Callanan was on Sheedy's All Ireland-winning minor team, Corcoran and Eoin Kelly acted as the hurley carriers to the team. They were supposed to be there to inspire the young fellas but instead the young fellas' setup inspired them.

"We were blown away by how professional Liam was," says Corcoran. "And that culture was then carried on by Tommy Dunne and Declan Ryan. Tommy was the one player in my career that reminded me of Roy Keane. Everything had to be done to the best possible standard. Shooting two out of every five wides in training wasn't on. On match day there was no messing around in the dressing room; you were there to take care of business. And Liam had that about him as well."

Sheedy's predecessor, Babs Keating, has repeatedly questioned the cost of running this Tipp senior team and the need for three goalkeepers and 30 outfield players on the panel, but having played under both setups, Corcoran is under no doubt which is best. "You need that depth if you're going to have realistic matches in training because you're always going to have fellas injured. Too often through the years we played 12-a-side and you got into bad habits."

Another core value of Sheedy's is to treat your players and people in general with respect. It's impossible to imagine Sheedy, for instance, presiding over a scenario like that which developed at the Limerick Gaelic Grounds last Tuesday where members of the local media – and this paper's hurling correspondent who had travelled from Kilkenny – whom had been informed there would be a press evening were instead locked outside the ground, their attendance in vain. Such paranoia and sheer bad manners would be alien to the new culture that pervades Tipp GAA; instead they held their press night a week earlier, in the comfort of the Horse and Jockey, just as they do 12 days out from every championship game, on the premise that should they reach the All Ireland final, there will be as little difference as possible from a press night in May.

For all his knowledge of hurling and hurley doctoring, it's also hard to picture McCarthy sitting down every few months in an hotel lobby with every player on his panel and going through, on an iPod, clips of how he can work on his game.

"The biggest thing a player can get is feedback," says Corcoran, "and Liam is excellent at it. You'd get a call to meet him and [coach] Eamonn [O'Shea] and [selector] Mick [Ryan] for 20 minutes and you'd actually be looking forward to it. Like last year after the Cork game, I was off the pace, and they drew a line under it; said the place was still there for me, but then showed me a clip where someone caught a ball over my head and we came up with ways I could work on that. There's nothing worse than playing a bad game and your manager ignoring you for a month and not knowing where you stand. Every player on that Tipp panel from one to 33 knows where he stands with Liam."

And that's what gives Corcoran such confidence about this game in Croker. Unlike the Dublin football management, he met every player from the '08 panel at the start of the season and asked what they felt were the factors behind their underperformance in their last game of the season.

"Liam learned a lot from last year, the biggest thing being you have to be ready from the moment the ball is thrown in. We had five weeks off and players probably got a bit complacent, thinking it would be close but that we should take Waterford alright. It took 20 minutes for fellas to wake up. You can see they've addressed that by the good starts they've had this year. Liam stressed work rate last year but it's gone up again. They hunt in packs. Our hurling has gone up 10 per cent on last year. Even on something like puck-outs; over the years Brendan's been criticised for his puck-out but you saw in the Munster final with the movement of the forward line that Brendan and the management had worked very hard on it."

Of course, they're not the finished article, as their recent fade-outs have shown. They could even be beaten today. From this vantage point their trajectory appears strikingly similar to Babs' first Tipp team. Huge strides made in year one with winning a Munster. Incremental progress made in year two with reaching an All Ireland final. It might take a year three before winning one.

But they're on the right path, doing things the right way.

kshannon@tribune.ie