How can the Cork hurlers emulate Limerick and become the team everybody wants to lose?

TEN years ago, when Cork defeated Kilkenny in the All-Ireland quarter-final, a wave of excitement rippled through the hurling world: Ding dong the witch is dead.

Kilkenny had shown signs of weakness in the three games prior to that, losing to Dublin before being brought to the brink by Tipperary and Waterford. The fatal blow landed by Cork instilled a level of unpredictability in the championship that not many would have envisaged at the start of that summer.

Suddenly, it was anyone’s game.

In the build-up to the meeting between Cork and Limerick this year, and at fleeting moments throughout the game, it looked as though history might repeat itself; that the walls of an imperial power might come tumbling down, and the gates blown wide open.

The marginal calls went in Cork’s favour that day 10 years ago (remember Shefflin’s first-half sending-off?). This time, they didn’t.

It is to Limerick’s eternal credit that they have become the team that everyone wants to lose.

Had they done the decent thing and rode off into the sunset after 2018, nobody would have begrudged them.

Instead, much like their dynastic forebearers a decade before, they’ve learned that you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

The week leading up to their do-or-die encounter saw us fervently trying to wish rumours of in-house squabbling above in Limerick into reality.

Instead, the champions produced their best performance of the summer and the player for whom all sorts of infractions were conjured up to account for his apparent jettisoning produced an imperious final 20 minutes that ultimately swung the game in their favour.

And so, it’s Limerick whose hurling campaign will progress into the summer months.

CHAMPIONS

Still standing, still champions, still the team to beat. And it’s Cork who are left to rue what might have been after two epic battles that teetered on a knife-edge right up to the final whistle.

A chasm of fortunes decided by the finest of margins.

It offers scant comfort to touch on the fact that since the inception of the Munster round-robin in 2018, no other team has come close to being eliminated having played so well.

Much has been said and written about the dog-eat-dog nature of the provincial championship, but it is worth noting that the competition has also been contested by its fair share of duds.

In 2018, Waterford and Tipperary failed to win a game, with the Déise repeating the trick the following season.

Last year, Tipp played their part as the abject also-ran, while Waterford’s season careered off a cliff once more (the problem can’t just be Davy?).

Three into five may seem unforgiving but in reality, the inclusion of at least one truly awful team in each of the five iterations so far has rendered the competition far less precarious than it seems.

Cork were not awful this year, far from it, but when you fail to win three decisive games that were there for the taking, it’s only right that you pack your bags.

Two one-point defeats away from home against the best two teams in the country are still, at their very essence, two defeats.

So there can be no complaints. Such is life.

Our aspirations from the outset of this year’s championship were for signs of progress, the most tangible of which would have been an All-Ireland semi-final berth and the emergence of one or two stand-out performers.

We failed to achieve the former while our realisation of the latter is still very much up for debate.

Having given ample game time to close to 30 players over the course of the league, Brian Roche, Eoin Downey, and Tommy O’Connell were the only debutants entrusted with starting berths come championship.

Roche was by far the most impressive of the three, but his undulating performances across the four games provided a stark reminder of just how difficult it is for a newcomer to survive and thrive at championship altitude.

This isn’t helped by the decay of the national league into sheer irrelevance which coupled with the cut-throat environment that exists in Munster at present allows little in the way of acclimatisation.

Man of the Match against Waterford? Good man, now go out and pick up Noel McGrath in six days’ time. Good stuff against Clare Brian, but forget about it now lad, you’re marking Kyle Hayes next week.

Inconsistency can only be expected.

With all this in mind, one championship season offers far too shallow a sample size to fairly assess the capabilities of the aforementioned trio among others like Brian Hayes, Pádraig Power, or Ethan Twomey.

Sure, many of us still haven’t made up our minds about players who have years of extractable data from which to stake a convincing claim one way or the other.

And this is by far and away the most disappointing aspect of our early-season elimination. Not the newcomers or lack thereof. And certainly not the old dogs that continue to trudge the hard road with no signs of stopping.

DOUBTS

But rather it’s the inbetweeners. The players that have been around long enough now that we should know for sure what they’re truly made of, the players for whom the benefit of doubt so generously afforded to them by supporters and management alike must be in short supply.

Can you really hang your hat on a player upon which the tag of ‘impact-sub’ has been bestowed? Can you really continue to roll the dice on a player whose feast-to-famine ratio is only going in one direction? Can you really persist with a very competent keeper but one that just doesn’t seem likely of exhibiting the watertight assuredness that is required of such a position?

Harsh appraisals perhaps, but it’s the hard answers to hard questions that may come to define Pat Ryan’s tenure.

One suspects that Ryan will have no qualms about doing just that.

In one year, he’s transformed a group of players that for years has been considered a soft touch into a team that above all else, has exuded an air of defiance.

For all the good work laid down by the likes of Kingston and Meyler, neither ever seemed capable of ever making their teams consistently hard to beat. 

In three of the four games, Cork were the inferior team. And in three of the four games, that almost didn’t matter.

That inferiority won’t last long either, you’d suspect. The change in Cork’s playing style this year was evident, with an emphasis on directness that yielded crucial scores at crucial stages.

The quality of ball in and more pertinently, the quality of ball winners must now be improved upon. And it will be.

Had Mark Coleman been around to knock ball into the path of Robbie O’Flynn up in the Gaelic Grounds, would it have made all the difference?

Quite possibly. Add another batch of U20 All-Ireland champions into the mix and surely, you’ve a recipe for success somewhere down the line. Just how far down the line is the question?

I’ve written previously of the concern that when Limerick eventually begin to show signs of mortality, Cork wouldn’t be in a position to capitalise.

While it’s very likely that Limerick will claim a four-in-a-row in the coming months, it is also likely that their stranglehold on the hurling championship is beginning to loosen.

Not many people would bet against Ryan’s Cork side of filling the power vacuum that may soon emerge.

This time, more than ever, something just feels different. And very soon, we might once again become that team that everybody wants to lose.