Madness can make the difference
Another Munster championship is done, dusted and locked away in the cellar. We won’t know the quality of this till we have let it settle a few years. I imagine when we look at it again we’ll say it wasn’t a great year but it was an interesting year.
For the time being we know Cork have taken the championship back and Clare, who looked last September like the best team to come out of the province in a long time, are the only serious Munster hurling side with nothing left to do for the summer.
Wednesday night just created more confusion about what the state of the nation is in Munster. Clare’s U21 side played some beautiful hurling that reminded me of last summer or even this spring when I watched Davy’s team take on Galway in the league.
They reached their sixth Munster final in seven years. At the same time Cork surprised themselves by beating a Waterford team who looked as if they had a better underage pedigree. Cork haven’t won an All-Ireland U21 title since 1998. Clare have won three in the last four years.
Explain why Cork should be short odds for a senior All-Ireland and Clare should be out of the championship? Explain it to all those counties who think they are doing everything right with structures and coaches and development squads and schools success.
Cork have won just one All-Ireland minor championship this century. Galway have won five. Galway and Clare have all summer left to play each other in challenges.
The problem reminds me of the old country music song, Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home.
When you are coaching, failure is much easier to handle than success.
Failure goes hand in hand with obscurity, frustration and hunger. Sheer blind mad hunger. When a group of players have failed enough and are hungry enough they will follow any leader with a map in his hand.
It doesn’t matter if he can or cannot read the map. They will make progress just by having a sense of purpose. They might not be doing the best thing but they are doing it as best they can. When you win in hurling, and that means winning an All-Ireland, you win big. You give yourself a break. You allow a bit of happiness into your life. You are content. You winter well and no matter how many times you tell yourself that this team of yours has achieved nothing yet you’re quite pleased with yourself giving out medals and getting awards and going to functions and feeling five times better looking than you were before you had an All-Ireland medal.
Happiness and contentment are desperate things to let into a dressing-room. In the year after an All-Ireland a manager has to battle against the happiness and the contentment and the feeling that the guys he is talking to don’t think they have to follow anybody with a map anymore.
I enjoyed Clare’s style last year that I didn’t see the fall coming at first. I watched them against Galway in the league and their style had survived. I saw them getting knocked out by Tipperary later and the father said to me it was no bad thing. Davy’s team didn’t need to go to a league final and get into a war with Kilkenny. I agreed. Win or lose there was nothing to be gained. Save Kilkenny until September. Let them do the worrying.
Championship came and Clare never showed up. Their best moments came last weekend when they had their backs to the wall against Wexford. Down in numbers, key players not performing like they could, a home crowd baying for blood and Clare managed to take the game to extra-time. With a little luck they could have got out of there alive.
When they were looking at defeat they got a taste of what the rest of this year would be like for them.
I remember after we won our first All-Ireland back in 1999 the good feelings lasted all the way through the Munster campaign the next year. Then we got beaten and it was like somebody switched the lights off. The public is incredibly fickle. In 1999 we looked further away from an All-Ireland than ever that spring. We took such a beating off Tipperary in a challenge game Jimmy Barry-Murphy wanted to walk away. Mark Landers and, I think, Fergal Ryan and Brian Corcoran persuaded him to stay. A few months later we were All-Ireland champions. Then Offaly beat us in the All-Ireland semi-final and it was as if we were back to where we were the week after Tipp had gutted us. Pure darkness. The adrenalin still going but no point in having it going.
Clare have until next February to wallow in all that. They will look back on this year and look at the indiscipline and the distractions (including football) and know the fault wasn’t in their stars, it was in themselves.
Waterford and Limerick, meanwhile, aren’t too far apart in terms of their development. They are doing a lot of things right. Great schools’ performances. Good underage teams. Some nice skilful hurlers coming through.
Yet it is so long since either won an All-Ireland you wonder if they have lost the thread. They have both been to All-Ireland finals in recent years and been beaten well. It never seemed to hurt as much as it should have. They both play nice hurling but last week Limerick should have been six or seven points up by the time Cork got a score.
You feed on your early dominance if you take the scores. They looked nervous and when Cork began to hurl and believe in themselves it was easy to forget how vulnerable the Cork defence had looked and to just admire the forwards starting to come together at last. Limerick looked as if they had accepted the way it was going to be long before they had to.
We’ll know this weekend if Waterford have the same trouble. It’s a hard one to call. They can beat Wexford but Wexford come into the match suddenly full of themselves. Playing every week, young players looking better and better. A definite method about them. If Waterford can get up to speed and stop Wexford’s big momentum they will know a lot more about what is inside themselves.
That leaves Tipp and Cork.
You look at Tipp sometimes and wonder if the whole idea of the big three in hurling is working against them. This is the 35th season since 1980. In that time Tipp have won four All-Ireland titles. Offaly have won four. Galway and Clare have three each. Cork aren’t far ahead on six. And Kilkenny are out on their own numbers wise.
In Tipp, every time they win it seems to take them a long time to get over it. You just have to watch them play on a good day though to see that the place has the culture. Young lads grow up with the hurley as an extension of their arm. They come to play with great skills but in the last few years they have played the way they have watched others play.
They matched Kilkenny with fire and brimstone in 2010. Kilkenny forgot that Henry Shefflin’s iced blood and an incredible day from PJ Ryan in goals was all that came between them and mortality a year earlier. They didn’t appear to heed the warnings from the Tipp forwards a year before. Then they broke a cardinal rule of the Cody era about nobody being undroppable when they started Henry Shefflin and John Tennyson in the All-Ireland final. The wheels came off. Kilkenny have been up the steps since. Tipp show no sign of it. We don’t know yet if the last couple of years have given them such a bellyful of pain that all they can feel is hunger. They themselves might not know until it’s too late.
Cork for some reason are the exception to the rule. They win a minimum of two All-Irelands per decade. For some reason those wins just seem inevitable. Failure makes a success of our home. We take our beatings then one year we get on a run and we snatch an All-Ireland. Nothing else about it causes any envy. Not our club scene, our schools, our underage set-up.
We win a few games and an All-Ireland seems like a self- fulfilling prophecy. I remember in 1999 as a young fella even after Tipp had taken us apart in that challenge game it never crossed my mind or the minds of anybody else that we weren’t good enough. I don’t know how that feeling gets passed on in the Cork character from generation to generation but it does.
You look at Cork and you think that for the thrill of winning Munster they have a long wait until their next game, for the dual players that wait will be filled with football qualifiers, for the others just waiting around while other teams grow battle-hardened.
And still you won’t write them off. We are always the exception to the rule for better or worse.
Is there any cure for the damage that success does to a team? Or for the limits that tradition puts on a county. It’s finding the right people. When it’s all over maybe Brian Cody’s greatest achievement will have been nailing everything in Kilkenny down so tight that they never seem satisfied with themselves. Or Loughnane’s greatest achievement might have been giving Clare a feeling of entitlement.
I believe in tactics, stats, regression analysis, sports science, sports psychology, structures, playing styles, the whole great talking shop.
Maybe, at the end of the day, the right amount of madness at the right time is what makes the difference.
