Kieran Shannon: Everything about Cork radiated defiance and belief
Cork's Kevin Flahive celebrates with Brian Hurley after the Munster SFC semi-final win over Kerry at Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Sunday. Picture: InphoI/Laszlo Geczo
Although it was 1983 and Tadhgie Murphy that Mark Keane’s goal had us all instantly referencing and reaching for, such was the nature and significance of this shock that it wasn’t the only moment from either Cork’s or Kerry’s past that was stirred up.
Seamus Darby was mentioned on Twitter more than once minutes either side of Keane’s incredible intervention. Queries whether Kerry had ever before been beaten by a team operating outside of the top 16 in the national league prompted mention of Martin Daly’s goal in 1992 that itself triggered the entire cattle population of a county to go unmilked for a week while the sudden death nature of Keane’s strike — not even time for the resultant kickout to be contested — also had echoes of Daly’s strike against Cork themselves in Ennis in ’97.
The last time Kerry were ambushed like this was 10 years ago, to Down in Croke Park. But if anything it was an All-Ireland quarter-final from the following year that last Sunday’s game resembled most.
In 2011 Cork were reigning national league champions, just as Kerry were entering Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Sunday. More so, they were reigning All-Ireland champions, something Kerry and Peter Keane came within a breath of becoming last September. But then just as we were all thinking another Cork-Kerry All-Ireland semi-final was a formality, Cork were set upon by a ravenous Mayo team that no one outside their own camp had given a prayer beforehand.
Although Down’s victory over Kerry was just as unlikely and stunning at the time, James McCartan’s men pretty much disappeared off the scene as quickly as they’d arrived on it. In contrast, James Horan’s team stayed around, so much so that they’re still at the top table, even if they agonisingly have yet to occupy its top seat.
Last Sunday Cork tore into Kerry the way Mayo did to Cork that day.
Everything about them radiated defiance and belief. It was more than a shock. It was a statement: We’re here now and we won’t be going away.
Instead of going all Ger Loughnane as he did in his pre-match comments last Sunday by declaring his team were going to win it — or at least that they had to win it — Ronan McCarthy could easily have played possum or at least the poor mouth.
No team in the country was later getting back all together than Cork — when inter-county training could resume on September 11, Cork only had seven players at their first session; the rest were still with their clubs. Similarly, they were about the only team in the country who couldn’t squeeze in a challenge game ahead of the resumption of the national league. And then when that national league resumed, they only got to play one of their two scheduled games with Longford conceding a walkover. Even if you believed 12 months ago when the draw was made ago that Cork could take Kerry, their games programme appeared to have scuppered any chance that they had.
That’s not how McCarthy and O’Neill looked at it though, becoming a case study in those old maxims of controlling the controllables and seeking the positives.
While Cork took huge store from their programme of challenge games in 2019 – within weeks of officially becoming a Division Three team, McCarthy had Cork thinking and preparing like a Division One team by lining up games against top-tier teams and winning them – he told media last Sunday that the absence of such games in 2020 didn’t perturb him, the same way Tyrone in their pomp didn’t even bother with them: having and creating ferociously-competitive in-house games more than compensated.
That such internal games would have predominantly in the one place also cannot be underestimated. For years the Cork footballers had been nomads with their own county, something the likes of Paddy Kelly and Derek Kavanagh bemoaned and highlighted shortly upon their retirements; as Kavanagh famously lamented, there was no place for Cork to call home, to say This is Cork.
But now they have such a base in CIT where O’Neill is the head of the college’s sport, leisure and childhood studies department: no longer does a manager have to scramble to find a place to train later that night, no longer do players have to wonder what time they’ve to leave work or get back from training.
But it’s more than facilities CIT offers. It’s expertise, like O’Neill’s and that of his department’s PhD student and team S&C lead, Kevin Smyth. In his recent book, The Hill, Bernard Brogan attributes Dublin’s rise and dominance of football to a confluence of factors, but not least the emergence of DCU as a hub for football in the county. UL has similarly contributed to the transformation of Limerick hurling. Cork, now with a progressive county board that is geared to facilitate rather than inconvenience its teams in their pursuit of excellence, finally has such a foundation and partnership too.
O’Neill’s own coaching prowess – and McCarthy’s humility to call upon it – must also be acknowledged, including in Kerry where up to now you sense they’ve been slow to put the proper respect on his name. It can’t be a fluke that he has been a common denominator in some of the greatest masterplans and upsets in recent championship history – the Tipp hurlers turning over Kilkenny in 2010, Mayo foiling Dublin in 2012, Kildare surprising Mayo in Newbridge, and indeed Kerry in 2014 outsmarting Jim McGuinness weeks after Jim had outsmarted Jim Gavin. He remains the last non-Dublin man to coach a team to Sam Maguire, and now that he’s added Kerry to his latest list of scalps, there may be overdue recognition in the Kingdom as to what he brought to that setup in his three years there.
Back when McCarthy crashed and burned in his first season in charge back in 2018, this column highlighted the lack of external experience in the Cork management. McCarthy had the modesty to address that inadequacy and others, not least in recruiting O’Neill. Now that they chose to dispense with Donie Buckley’s vast technical and external experience garnered from his time in Mayo, it is Kerry’s insularity that has to come into question.
They had no choice but to acknowledge that Dublin had left them behind in the S&C stakes, prompting them to hire Armagh-born and O’Neill protégé Jason McGahan as a full-time head of athletic performance. But when it comes to other softer but crucial areas of performance preparation like psychology and team culture, an old-school feár laidír culture remains too pervasive. One former Kerry player lately commented to me, Brogan’s ghostwriter, how deflated he was reading The Hill and discovering how integrated and important the mindset ‘piece’ is in the Dublin setup compared to Kerry’s casual, indifferent approach to it over the years.
Peter Keane is hardly on the chopping block – as McCarthy himself acknowledged, Kerry could just as easily have scraped a win last Sunday, just as they survived against Cork in 2015 and against a Monaghan in 2007, and Keane would have been on to make it to four national finals out of four – but he is now on the clock. Is it in him to realise there’s more to football than football? There’ll be few more intriguing questions in football to track in 2021.
Sunday will prove to be a useful reminder to all of us as much as David Clifford and Seán O’Shea that they are not yet the finished product; that in our hurry to proclaim them as the new Gooch and Declan O’Sullivan we can overlook the growing pains O’Sullivan had even in an All-Ireland winning year like 2006 and Cooper’s sophomore struggles in 2003. They had to learn some time you can’t win an All Star every year. Long term it will make them steelier, better.
But just as Gooch and O’Sullivan kept running into Cork up above in Croke Park, Clifford and O’Shea will realise that Cork are going to be around for the long term too. Cork may not be yet ready to win it all or even reach an All Ireland in 2020, just as Mayo in 2011 weren’t quite ready to play into September, being schooled by Gooch at his majestic best. But just as they won the last All Ireland before Stephen Cluxton got into knack of winning Sam, they as a county are positioned to be constantly in the mix for All Irelands in the post-Cluxton era too.
