By Paul Keane
When Noel McGrath burst onto the inter-county scene with Tipperary, winning an All-Star award in his debut season of 2009, he was still a teenager.
He hadn’t even turned 20 the following year when he picked up his first All-Ireland senior medal.
“I’d just started college in UCD,” he smiled.
Precisely a decade and a half on, the Loughmore-Castleiney man is now the proud owner of four senior medals, his latest collected on Sunday a few months shy of his 35th birthday.
John Doyle is still out in front as the Tipperary man with the most medals, a whopping eight, picked up between 1949 and 1965. Then comes Jimmy Doyle, on six, with a larger group on five. And after that it’s McGrath, truly a Premier County icon.
But he’s not a teenage student anymore, far from it. These days McGrath is a married man, and he and wife Aisling have a two-year-old boy, Sam, with another baby on the way in October. He’s busy in the day job too with an animal health company, liaising with vets around Munster.
“It’s a different story to 2009 and 2010 but it’s great and I love it and to be able to have my son there on Sunday was probably one of the greatest things that I could have done, getting to lift the Liam MacCarthy Cup with him in my arms,” said McGrath, who understood the significance of collecting a fourth medal.
“There’s no point saying that I didn’t know that if we won, getting to four was the first time since ’65 or ’71 that someone had done it. I live hurling and I know a lot about the history of Tipperary so I would have been aware of that and now that it’s happened, sure it’s a great feeling and I’m delighted to be one of those with four medals.
“There’s a lot of lads with three and a few with two, and more who won their first on Sunday, so to be in that category with four is unreal.”