'For Mikey, it's just been a new lease of life to be there and facing the ball'
IT’S WORTH A look back at the highlights reel from the 2020 All-Ireland SHC qualifier between Tipperary and Cork, if only to remind yourself just how good an attacker Michael Breen was.
He scored five points that mid-November afternoon in Limerick, the first of which came off his right side from the right wing, the second of which came off his left side from the same wing.
Tipp won that battle but lost the war, exiting the Championship in their next game, an All-Ireland quarter-final against Galway.
Just two Tipp players were nominated for All-Stars that season and versatile midfielder Breen, pretty much on the strength of that game against Cork, was one of them.
Pat Horgan had scored 1-8 for Cork against Tipp, including a brilliant solo goal, yet wasn’t nominated, underlining just how good Breen had been.
Five years on, there is a decent chance they will end up marking each other at some stage of Sunday’s All-Ireland final, perhaps for the duration.
One of Liam Cahill’s very first acts was to switch Breen, after eight seasons in either the Tipperary midfield or half-forward line, into the full-back line.
Tipp’s first competitive game under Cahill was a Munster Hurling League encounter on the third day of 2023 and Breen played the entire match at full-back.
Two and a half years on, his transition from high scoring midfielder/half-forward – Breen rifled 6-42 in the Championship between 2015 and 2022, only failing to score in eight of his 32 appearances – is complete.
In his 16 appearances since the switch, he has scored just two points, taking far more joy these days from breaking the hearts of opposition forwards than splitting the posts himself.
Breen, who started both the 2016 and 2019 All-Ireland final wins over Kilkenny, began April’s Munster SHC defeat to Cork by marking Horgan.
Liam Cahill may alternatively figure this weekend that Breen’s power and mobility is the kryptonite that will finally bring Cork’s Brian Hayes, the Hurler of the Year favourite, to his knees.
Either way, it was a sweet bit of business by Cahill to look into Breen’s past and fire up the defender inside him again. The Ballina man initially rose to prominence as a back with the Tipp minors, despite regularly lining out in attack for his club in the same period.
And when he made his adult bow with the club’s intermediates, in 2013, he played at centre-forward. Gradually, he moved back the lines to midfield and then centre-back.
But the Cahill move to relocate Breen to Tipp’s full-back line came entirely out of the blue at the beginning of 2023. Looking back now, it was a clear effort to add badly needed dynamism and power to a defence that had been under siege for the guts of three years.
Between 2020 and 2022, Tipp played 10 Championship games and lost eight. Colm Bonnar’s last game as Tipp manager, at the end of the 2022 Championship, was a dozen-point tanking from Cork. Breen played chiefly as a wing-forward that day.
Early in the transition stage for Breen, former Tipperary player Michael Cleary said that the then 28-year-old was ‘perhaps a bit cavalier for a full-back’ but concluded that ‘I just like the idea of it’.
Around the same time, ex-Tipp defender Declan Fanning claimed that Breen had gone a little stale anyhow, and that the move was as much to revive the player himself as it was the team.
“I feel over the last couple of years he has been struggling for consistency,” said Fanning in early 2023. “He was either an eight-out-of-10 or below par and taken off. For Mikey, it’s just been a new lease of life to be there and facing the ball.”
Breen started all of Tipp’s National League games in 2023, four of their six in 2024 and all of them again last spring as they reached the final. He has lined out and lasted the duration of all seven of their Championship games this summer too. Of the other Tipp defenders, only Bryan O’Mara has managed that.
If he can pull it off now, and land a third All-Ireland medal in a brand new position, Breen will join a pantheon of greats who have excelled at the very highest level and won All-Irelands in different positions. Brian Corcoran, Kyle Hayes, John Conlon, Tommy Walsh; Breen would join an exclusive club.
If it doesn’t happen, school-teacher Breen will still be in a good spot in life. His partner is Olympian and fellow Tipp native Sharlene Mawdsley. The Newport AC runner, and Breen, have documented their relationship on social media with athlete Mawdsley stating that the All-Ireland semi-final win over Kilkenny was her first time in Croke Park.
Immediately after that game, Breen revealed his belief that if Tipp could just get back to Croker, where they hadn’t played since the 2019 final, they would “unleash and perform”.
He also spoke of the journey the team has undertaken, describing the Tipp jersey as “on the floor” 12 months ago, after losing three of their four Munster group games, with “the whole of Ireland looking down on it”.
Now they’re back and Breen has been a key player in the turnaround.
“I’m coming towards the end I think,” he smiled, referencing his advancing age in a team enlivened by young stars this year.
Still a man for the big stage though.
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