Cork v Tipperary: Rebels side will play as named - but that doesn't make them easy to stop

The topic of dummy teams is one that has received some attention of late.

Barry O’Mahony had a recent column on the topic in these pages while Adam Moynihan ran the numbers in an Irish Examiner piece – they showed that Down, Mayo, Monaghan and Tyrone had made changes between team announcement and throw-in in every game they had played this year.

Another four counties had a change rate higher than 90 percent. While our own focus means that we perceive Cork to be common proponents of the practice, their 62 percent figure was lower than 14 other counties.

In the current hurling championship campaign, the figure for Pat Ryan’s side is a nice fat zero – and one can expect, barring a freak late injury – that the side named at the end of this week will be the one that takes to the field against Tipperary on Sunday afternoon.

Prior to the semi-final win over Dublin, the manager made clear his distaste for the practice of making late alterations.

“I think it's dishonest to the players themselves,” he said.

“You can talk about the panel and you can talk about the strength of it and the belief that you have in everybody else, but if you're pretending that, you know, Joe Bloggs is playing before someone so the other lad's going to think it.

“You have a player going home then and he's telling his mum and dad, then, oh, I'm starting, because he can't tell him that Séamus Harnedy's playing before him. So how's he going to come off the bench then and perform?

“That's my thing, I suppose I've never done it, so other fellas will say that's how they have their teams changed up and they know what's going on and everybody's comfortable in what we're doing. We've never done it, so if I started doing it now, it'd be alien to what we do.” In any case, Cork don’t really need to try to spring a surprise as their best team is largely known – but opponents still struggle to stop them.

Of the 21 players to start a game for Cork in this championship campaign, Darragh Fitzgibbon remains the only one to have done so in two different lines of the pitch. Tipperary have had 23 starters, with eight displaying their versatility by playing in more than one line.

It’s not to say that it’s better or worse to chop and change – Tipp are in the final on merit, lest it need to be said – consistency of selection may be something that stands to Cork, especially when it comes to matchups on Sunday.

The full-forward line of Patrick Horgan, Alan Connolly and Brian Hayes is the only one to have had the same starters for all six championship outings to date and it is one that caused Tipperary problems in both the league final and the Munster SHC round-robin game at SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

How Tipp deal with that challenge – Ronan Maher could be put tagging Hayes for instance, after limiting TJ Reid in the semi-final – could play a large part in determining Sunday’s outcome.