Kieran Shannon: Cork much kinder to the championship than the championship is to them
Clare Tackled Mcmanus, Connolly Adam Of Cork By Sportsfile Of Hogan Is Guaranteed Pic: Alan Action: Ray
It’s open to being interpreted by Pat Ryan as more “false pity” of the sort he labelled and abhorred last year, but after witnessing a game like the one his team played such a part in, both our initial and overriding reaction is to thank and even congratulate his team as well as Clare long before getting into where he and his players may have got it wrong.
Yes, we know, he’s over Cork, a county that is supposed to be all about winning and has had enough of losing and waiting to win the big one.
And we know just as he does only too well that this was his team’s fourth straight loss in Munster and their fifth without a win. That isn’t meant to matter that Cork have lost all those games by a single puck of the ball. A loss is a loss and losing is losing.
What makes the Munster hurling championship so compelling though isn’t just that it’s unforgiving like all high performance sport is but that it’s invariably a spectacle.
This game classically exemplified that, being a game worthy of the stadium it was played in just as the stadium was worthy of this game.
It underlined how hurling goes, especially in this province under this particular format: the ball is thrown in, what ensues is a mix of madness and the glorious whereby any team could win and then when the music stops just one team has.
It can happen that a team is much kinder to a championship than a championship is to a team.
By the time the inaugural round-robin championship of 2018 reached Croke Park, Michael Ryan’s Tipperary had long been dismissed, having had to pack their bags like a golf trunk pro that’s missed the cut.
In four games in Munster they failed to win even one. In their opening game they had been well off the pace, much like Cork in Walsh Park last week, losing by six to a Limerick side that they and everyone else had no idea was embarking on their first of five successful All-Ireland winning campaigns.
But after that they contributed to three crackers: coming from nine down at half-time to draw with Cork in Thurles; coming from 11 points and a man down to draw with Waterford in Limerick; then losing to Clare by two at the death after a Jake Morris shot hit the post at one end and an Ian Galvin shot finished just inside a post at the other end. We wouldn’t all have fallen so quickly in love with the new format if Ryan’s Tipp hadn’t played their share of lovely hurling.
It’s something similar now with this Ryan’s Cork. Their recent win-loss record in Munster might be abject but their performances have been anything but. It’s not as if they’re like the Waterford of 2018-2019 that lost six consecutive games in Munster by a combined 68 points; Cork have lost their last four games by a cumulative seven points.
Their latest opponents are a reminder of why they should not despair or panic. In 2021, Brian Lohan was in his second season over Clare just as Ryan is now in his second season over Cork.
That year the teams met in a qualifier in Limerick and on that occasion it was Cork who edged the first of three consecutive championship games between them where only a point or two divided the teams: while this weekend in Cork Mark Rogers got in the way of a last-ditch rocket from Damien Cahalane and last year in Ennis a long-distance Diarmuid Ryan missile swung it for Clare, that 2021 game hinged on Patrick Collins denying Tony Kelly at the death.
Clare stuck with Lohan even though in two years in charge he’d failed to get his team to Croke Park: they appreciated he was on the right track, that that game could have gone either way and it easily could have been Clare instead of Cork that contested that year’s All Ireland final.
Cork lost considerably better here than they did in Walsh Park and there is confidence, not just comfort, to be taken in that.
But it should also infuriate them that it was still too alike that defeat.
The last Cork team to deliver Liam McCarthy to Leeside used to consistently win the close games because, to borrow that well-known line from the Al Pacino speech they’d play on their way into Croke Park, they’d fight and die for that inch that would ultimately be the difference between winning and losing – not fling it away.
Discipline, enforced by the slogan, Silent Pig, was a cornerstone of their programme. Red cards were something to be accumulated by the opposition, not the team in red.
You would think that after Damien Cahalane’s dismissal in Walsh Park that any Cork player on a yellow card, let alone a veteran player in the fullback line, would give the referee no excuse to issue a second one: after making one of the most intelligent and bravest defensive plays you could see in blocking another Mark Rodgers goal with his hurley, Seán O’Donoghue instantly committed one of the most foolhardy, blocking-tripping Shane O’Donnell with his leg.
All successful Cork teams have also been anchored by not just a competent but outstanding goalkeeper, from Coleman and Cunningham to Cusack to even Nash, a two-time starting Munster and All-Star winner.
Collins in his distribution and even demeanour is not quite in that lineage and in an environment where now no one or position is safe it’s hard to know how many more opportunities he should be afforded to try to do so.
Will he be in goals for the visit of Limerick? Don’t know.
Will Cork lose again? Again, don’t know: with this crew, it could go either way.
Will we be there? Sure when you know it’s bound to be another thriller as they’re involved, definitely.
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