Christy O'Connor: Cork winning but not actually hurling better than last year

ON ‘Allianz League Sunday’ last weekend, Joanne Cantwell asked Dónal Óg Cusack if he thought Liam Sheedy – who was sitting beside Cusack – was right in his assessment that Cork only had five or six of their championship team on the pitch against Wexford.

“I think so,” said Cusack. “If you counted through it, Cork are definitely getting more and more players. Whether we have enough players, and enough top, top players, that will only be judged during the summer. But I think it’s a fair comment out of Liam.” 

So, who are those five or six? Patrick Collins, Niall O’Leary, Ciarán Joyce, Shane Barrett, Shane Kingston, Seamus Harnedy? Probably, even if you could make a strong case for Eoin Dowey, Tommy O’Connell and Brian Roche.

At least Cork now have at least two more games – and possibly three – to settle on their championship team, which is important considering that more and more experienced players will filter back into the side over the next few weeks.

On the other hand, if Cork still have eight or nine, or even 10, established players to come back into the squad, do they have enough time to get up to speed with a significant share of them having been out of action for so long since the year began?

Pat Ryan doesn’t seem concerned. When Cork play A-versus-B games in training, the ‘A team’ are the 15 who started the previous game. And Ryan works from that starting point.

“I think I never get into a situation where I’m picking the first 15 for April 30,” Ryan said to Denis Hurley after last week’s game. “I think that’s unfair on the players that are there. I think when you get into that, your head gets confused on what you’re doing.

“We judge what we see on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I don’t think you should get into a situation where you’re saying, ‘this is my A team’. You’re not being fair to what’s happening. You start seeing things because you want to see them and you’re not seeing what’s happening in training.” 

CHARACTER

From day one, Ryan has been very clear on what he wanted to focus on in the early part of the season – building character and a strong mentality.

Developing and honing those qualities on the training field far superseded any advanced work on tactics and strategies, especially up to this point of the season. That was obvious last Sunday when Wexford posed Cork some tactical problems that took Cork a long time to work out.

At the moment, Ryan is clearly trying to get the balance right between style and attitude, with a premium on the latter. Recent Cork management teams have worked extremely hard at trying to make the group emotionally stronger and more resilient, but Ryan has invested so heavily in that area because a better and more resilient attitude will ultimately dictate, and produce, a better style of play.

Despite Cork having won four games in a row, they are not playing any better than they did at this stage last season. Cork did play well against Galway but Galway were atrocious. Examining the other three performances against Limerick, Westmeath and Wexford, Ryan would probably only be happy with the second half against Limerick.

Ryan wants to play a more direct style, with quicker and faster ball into the full-forward line, but Cork’s struggles with that approach last Sunday showed that being more direct won’t always work as well as Ryan intends it to.

The weather was a significant factor but the standout stat last Sunday was the 51 times Cork turned over the ball, with a huge proportion of that possession stemming from ball that didn’t stick in the full-forward line.

ATTITUDE

There are times that Cork need to mix it up and run the ball more through the midfield platform. However, if Ryan deems – for the moment anyway – that attitude supersedes tactics on the training ground, attitude is ensuring that Cork are finding new ways to win tight games.

It’s easy to understand Ryan’s thinking because any other approach has failed for too long in Cork. It’s not as if other Cork managers and management teams didn’t concentrate on that area but Ryan clearly believes that this way has to be the starting and finishing point – for now at least until Ryan and his coaches can start adding new layers of complexity to their style of play.

That still requires a delicate approach. Brian Cody always said that he never cared about a settled team as long as he had a settled spirit, which Cody always had in Kilkenny. Cork definitely seem to have a settled spirit, but it’s still impossible to compare Cork to Cody’s Kilkenny considering the level of instability that has defined the Cork squad for so long.

Despite all the experimenting most of the teams have done throughout the campaign, it’s much easier to shake the side up and throw new players in when a manager has a clearer idea of his starting 15.

Galway, for example, were extremely poor against Cork and Limerick, but their best performance of the league last Sunday against Clare coincided with effectively having at least 12, possibly 13, of their first 15 that will start the championship against Wexford on April 22.

Sooner or later, Ryan will have to start forming a clearer vision of his starting 15. Yet he doesn’t seem overly worried about it at the moment. 

Whether he is right or not, Ryan’s approach has been justified by the manner in how Cork are finding new ways to win tight games.