Christy O'Connor: Cork can't stand sight of Clare and Limerick after recent defeats

On the night Cork beat Clare in the 1999 Munster final, Johnny Callanan, the former Clarecastle and Clare hurler, told Anthony Daly, the Clare captain that day, a funny story.

A few pints had helped to siphon some of the pain from the defeat but Callanan wanted to try put more perspective on the day’s events. So he told Daly about a Monday afternoon in the early 1980s, the day after Cork had beaten Limerick in the championship.

Callanan got a call from his brother-in-law, Seán O’Donovan, asking him to meet O’Donovan and a crew of other Limerick hurlers for lunch. O’Donovan, who won four senior championships with Kilmallock, was raking through the embers of Limerick’s defeat to Cork with Callanan when Ger Clohessy, the Young Munster rugby player joined the conversation.

‘If ye don’t mind me saying so lads,’ Clohessy said to them. ‘Ye hates each other (Clare and Limerick). Ye hates Tipp. But ye don’t hates them boys (Cork) enough.’ 

Callanan lost a few painful Munster finals to Cork during his career. He always carried that sickening taste of Munster final defeat on his tongue, but that comment from Clohessy always reminded Callanan why the taste always remained so bitter.

“Cork codded us for 60 years,” Callanan said to Daly that night in 1999. “Telling us all, ‘Ye’re great lads, we’d love to see ye win a Munster title’. We were thinking, ‘Cork are fierce nice lads.' But why wouldn’t they be nice to us when they kept batin’ us?” 

No matter how hard Clare and Limerick tried, they could never consistently beat Cork. 

Clare finally did in the 1990s, when taking down Cork in four successive championship matches between 1993 to '98, before Cork responded with a vengeance, defeating Clare in their next seven championship matches.

After Clare finally staunched that bleeding in 2013, doing so on the biggest stage of all in the All-Ireland final replay, Cork responded with a vengeance once more, taking down Clare in six of their next seven championship games between 2014-’21 which included successive Munster final wins in 2017 and 2018.

RECORD

Yet since that qualifier defeat to Cork in 2021, Clare have beaten Cork in their last four championship games. When the sides meet on the opening championship day in April, Clare will have an opportunity to beat Cork for a fifth successive time, which would be a record.

It's been a golden period for Clare against Cork, while, prior to last year, Limerick were enjoying a similar halcyon period against Cork, having beaten them in four successive championship matches between 2021-’23.

Cork have been here before – especially with Clare in the 1990s – but they’ve never been under the cosh so much against two fellow Munster sides at the same time.

There may have been a time when, despite continually losing to Cork, Clare and Limerick still didn’t hate(s) Cork enough. 

Decades later and that narrative has certainly flipped; Cork now can’t stand the sight of Clare and Limerick.

At least Cork stopped the bleeding against Limerick last year, while they’ll aim to do the same against Clare in 11 weeks. Whatever happens, the rivalry that Cork has built up against both teams has become a standout theme of hurling’s current, and fascinating, narrative.

Saturday night was another chapter in that story, where the opening lines were written long before a ball had even been pucked, punctuated by an ongoing drama about whether or not the game would be shown on TV. Even though it was, and the weather was horrendous, a huge crowd of over 23,000 still showed up.

SPARK

Clare and Limerick is still the biggest rivalry now in the province, but Cork-Clare is hot. Yet the Cork-Limerick rivalry now is sparking to a level it never has before on such a consistent basis.

Cork have an advantage in that PUC can take such huge crowds – unlike say, Ennis. Yet the last great rivalry that regularly attracted such huge crowds for league and championship games was Clare-Tipperary in the late 1990s.

Eventually though, Clare-Tipp became the victim of the familiarity which is supposed to be the lifeblood of the provincial championships – they met in nine championship matches in ten years between 2003, but the fizz had gone flat by the end of that period.

There is more potential to meet more often now with the round robin. Cork and Limerick have now met nine times in championship in the last seven seasons, but the corks have still been constantly popping off the champagne bottles; five of those matches would rank amongst the top 15 matches played in that timespan.

Their two games last year were two of the greatest matches ever played. They were also two of the most memorable occasions in living memory. 

The eternal night in Cork last May was followed an All-Ireland semi-final that attracted the biggest attendance ever for a hurling game on that stage.

When great rivalries are boiling, nobody thinks they will ever cool down for two particular teams. When they often do, it’s because one team gets on top of the other and the public lose interest.

There was that fear for Cork in a 10-month period between 2021-’22, when Limerick won their three championship meetings by an aggregate margin of 32 points.

Yet Cork have emphatically turned that trend around and the rivalry between the two teams has never been hotter.

And Saturday again proved that the relationship is now constantly at boiling point. So imagine the heat that will rise up when they clash in the Gaelic Grounds in May?

Volcanic.