Rejuvenated Tierney embracing opportunity with Offaly footballers

For players and supporters alike, the hardest thing to take about Offaly’s 2026 National League was how it was as it was diagnosed with a terminal illness before it started, and once Louth picked up two points from Tullamore in the first round of games, all sense of hope extinguished.

In 2025, when Offaly enjoyed a magnificent league, competed well with Meath in Navan and then lost out in the Tailteann Cup in a tense battle in Newbridge against the eventual winners, even then there was a sense that whatever attributes this group had, huge panel depth wasn’t one of them.

Going into the 2026 campaign, the casualty list was as long as an anaconda and every bit as asphyxiating, the man who was earmarked as the solution to a longstanding fielding deficit was ten time zones away, and it felt like every load-bearing pillar around which the team was constructed had been removed.

Fast forward to last week’s Leinster SFC launch, and Shane Tierney’s reflections on the campaign echoed that overall sense of ‘what might have been’ if Offaly had been given a chance to take on those better opponents with a full hand to play.

“We came up to Division Two and we believed that we were good enough to compete and to stay at that level. Unfortunately, things just didn't go to plan,” he admitted.

“We've tried to remain positive throughout the league, Mickey (Harte) mentioned at the start, think about where this group could be when players that are playing at the moment and getting opportunities, when they improve and gain new experiences. Then we get those injured players back – what could we be then?”

He expects that on Saturday, we’ll get a lot closer to answering that question.

“We're kind of getting to that position now with injuries starting to come back. It was definitely not an ideal league campaign, but Laois is probably the perfect game to hopefully turn this around and hopefully build a bit of buzz and excitement again in the county.

“We've shown signs. There's players there, the likes of Cormac Egan and Keith O’Neill, who are ready to flourish and perform, we just need to roll in behind them. Hopefully over the summer, we can get enough opportunities and enough games to show that we haven't regressed as a team. I know results might look like that but we don't feel like we have, we feel we've gained from this experience in Division Two and we can show what we've learned and how we've improved.”

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For the players, the list of absentees was an unfortunate reality, and there was no option other than to simply dig in and carry on.

For supporters, however, particularly in the modern game where there are so many intercounty games at all levels, they weren’t compelled to hang in there and the truth is, many didn’t. The official attendance of 625 at the Cavan game was a statistic that shocked a lot of people and while the crowd was nearly five times that for when Meath came to town a week later, the eerie silence that greeted Offaly scores proved that it was Royal County supporters who packed out Tullamore, travelling to see their side wrap up promotion.

“In terms of the support, that was probably the most disappointing thing of the whole league. We feel like last year we wouldn't have got out of Division Three without our support.

“What's happened this year is probably we haven't given the Offaly supporters a team to follow because of the disappointing results,” he acknowledged.

“We're just hoping now that with the fact that we're playing Laois, players are getting back from injury and the team is in a healthier place, now here's a bit of a buzz and that support gets behind us. Then we can perform, give them a team to follow and it can make it hopefully an enjoyable summer for everybody.

“Offaly fans have shown over the last couple of years they're as good as anything in the country, we've seen that with the underage, the minors, the under-20s, in hurling and football. We need that support in the Laois game, because they're going to bring it. If we can get that, hopefully then we can reward the fans by performing over the summer, starting with a win in that Laois game”.

“Last year, it was one-each between us and Laois. We beat them earlier in the league, they won the Tailteann Cup game. We want to show what we've learned from Division Two and that we believe we're better than Laois and we can show it in a championship game.”

Taking a bit of time to show your quality is something of a theme for Tierney. He exploded onto the scene with a hat-trick in his debut for the Offaly minors all the way back in 2014, and three years later he scored 0-9 in a three-game U-21 campaign, while making his senior debut in a league game against Longford the same year.

In 2018 and 2019 he made 16 senior appearances, all off the bench, and then he disappeared from the scene, written off by many as just one more very promising young player who didn’t quite make it at the top level.

Fast forward to 2026, and he appreciates how lucky he is to have had a second coming.

“First of all, I have to take responsibility myself. I was in college, I was probably enjoying myself a little bit too much at times,” is his explanation.

“Then there were other times as well where I felt like I was going well and maybe wasn't getting the chance. When I took a step away I reflected on it, then I was in Australia and I probably thought my inter-county career was over. I missed it and I felt like I still had something to offer. I came home and I was mad to get back involved.

“Thankfully, I played a club game and Mickey and Declan were there and they brought me back in. I've loved the panel since I've come back in. I really like the younger lads' mindsets and I've mixed really well with them.

“I'm just glad I got a second chance because I feel like I probably would have had a lot of regrets if I didn't get those back-to-back appearances, get that kind of rhythm into my game, playing with Offaly. I played a lot of underage and I really wanted to show that I could do it at a senior level as well”.

Having a couple of peers who made the step up that bit more seamlessly didn’t help ease the pain of missing out.

“I probably wasn't mature enough and then, look, I played bit part roles here and there, David Dempsey would have come in at the same time as me and Jordan Hayes and they'd be two of my best friends. They probably really stuck it out and really drove it on there for a good number of years. I was really happy for them but I had regrets myself that I probably didn't do that.

“I'm just glad that I've got another opportunity and that I've got to show that I feel like I was good enough to play at that level.”

Due to his size and his absence from the scene for a while, people often forget that he’s now one of the elder statesmen in the team. Size alone would have been an almost insurmountable obstacle at the top level of the game prior to the FRC revolution, but now he’s revelling in a different type of football.

“Somebody earlier asked me what Cillian Bourke was like when he came in last year, he blew every S&C test out of the water, he was a beast of a man. I wasn't at that physical capacity and probably at underage at the time, you didn't need to be and then when you step into senior level, I struggled with it.

“Simply, I wasn't up to standard in the S&C side of things. So I really went after it and made sure that if I ever got back in again that I was able to play at that level and I worked hard at my S&C.

“But I do think that the new rules have helped as well. You've seen a lot more forwards, you've seen James Conlon there in our game and the league final, the trouble he's causing. Even Jordan Morris wouldn't be a huge man, there's more of that kind of, maybe let's say, your older stereotypical corner forward starting to come back into the game and there's more 1 v 1 scenarios and it's allowing maybe forwards of all sizes to flourish in the new rules.

“I would have been given a role when I first came in with Offaly as an impact sub, I would have been told not to leave the inside 21 when you come on. Now the way the rules are, you want ball players out around the middle as well. Cathal Flynn's probably the best example of it, every single attack ran through him last year. Maybe in the older rules you would have said he was smaller in stature for that role but it's just the way the game's gone now. It's 1 v 1s and stuff so if you can use your skill on the ball to beat a man or evade him or to start an attack.

“So there is definitely the room out there for maybe smaller men as well to start the attacks or cause a bit of harm”.

Room for smaller men, and room for comebacks. Offaly as a whole will hope that this bears true when Laois come to town on Saturday.