Larry Ryan: Corkness may be the only known force to counter Limerick's invincibility
NOT FOR CATCHING: Cork’s Shane Kingston goes on a solo run in the All-Ireland SHC qualifier victory over Dublin in Thurles. Once it’s released, there’s no putting Corkness back in the bottle. The commemorative double has never been more on.
We know well that your best chance of winning a hurling match is to have been poor enough the last day.
There has been some grousing about the game lately — complaints about the number of scores and stoppages and whatnot, as well as regular visits from our old friend, the cynicism.
But surely the biggest disappointment is that we are still falling back on the Savage Hunger.
Surely by now we might have expected one of the modern hurling gurus to parse their GPS readings into a gameplan based on artistry alone.
In this interrupted year — where the countyman was given some respite from The Sacrifices and The Demands — you half hoped some crowd might be able to roll out a plan that facilitated one or two lads who had summered well, as long as they had the wrists.
But no, even Derek McGrath, who has crunched all the numbers, accepts you are still going nowhere without ‘vicious savagery’. Without the blessed intensity.
So your best bet is to have been shocking last week or the week before, so you can get ‘a bounce’.
Ideally, you should have been ‘septic altogether’, putting you in the enviable position of being able to deliver afterwards the time-honoured rebuke: ‘Everyone wrote us off coming up here today.’
‘The bounce’ only lasts for the first 15 minutes of a game, Dalo calculated, on the Irish Examiner hurling podcast this week. But you can get a good bit of the job done in a quarter of an hour, as Cork showed last weekend.
It must be the greatest test of the hurling bainisteoir, this balancing act. Getting enough out of the team to win the key matches, while at the same time making it clear to everyone, until the time is right, that you’re ‘at nothing this year’.
There is the other approach, of course, where you build an ‘aura of invincibility’, but it is fraught with difficulty.
Tipp, for instance, have tended to stay away from this method in recent times, preferring to include one horror show — two if they can get away with it — en route to glory. Invincibility just doesn’t sit easily on a modest, genial people.
Kilkenny became experts at it, obviously, but then, as Jackie Tyrrell told us, Brian Cody’s great trick was convincing Kilkenny to always play like underdogs, whatever the circumstances.
They are the only county immune to the whims and vagaries of the Savage Hunger, existing as they do in a permanent state of ‘genuineness’.
Now Limerick are gamely having another go at the invincibility, despite the lessons of last year when they paid the price for annihilating Tipp in the Munster final.
Limerick are rampaging around with their jerseys a size too small in a live interpretation of the old Not Men But Giants Guinness campaign. They are sucking teams into their ‘crashzone’ and bursting them. Their points tallies are unbalancing the ledgers of hurling convention.
And with their conveyor belt, and academy, and structures, they make it clear they are here to stay.
The great advantage of this approach is that you persuade opponents to second-guess themselves, to pick their teams to cope with you rather than beat you.
But when you go down this dangerous road, you must constantly double down with shows of strength. And while some might consider it a costly enough way to send a message in the lead up to a Munster final, was it really a coincidence that JP lashed out a record £570,000 for Douvan’s brother on Thursday?
Could it be any plainer that this was a warning shot that the money isn’t running out any time soon and that Limerick will be doing things right for the foreseeable.
It’ll be hard enough for Waterford to compete with that kind of certainty, particularly as they don’t even have a bad day out to fall back on.
The same can probably be said for Galway this weekend, especially after Kilkenny were delivered early the very present Brian Cody writes away for every Christmas — a fright.
Clare will probably struggle too, because after Wexford’s no-show against Galway, nobody bounces higher than Davy. Even if Lohan is sitting on him on the sideline.
And then you have Cork v Tipp. Ordinarily, this one would be, as TJ Ryan so beautifully put it, like a deaf dog: Hard to call.
Cork may not have used up all the bounce they got for letting down Christy Ring against Waterford. While Tipp begin their rebound along a familiar backroad.
But of course we must build into our calculations the obvious complicating factor: The intoxicating rise of Corkness.
Injured Cork forward Ciarán Sheehan has been a revelation on the Irish Examiner Gaelic Football podcast. But the lad still has a lot to learn.
Ciarán produced a highly technical description of Mark Keane’s winner in Páirc Uí Chaoimh last Sunday.
“As soon as it came off the boot he took his eye off the ball, reset into position, engaged Tommy Walsh’s body, released in the drop zone, ball into his hand, goal. It was straight out of the AFL textbook.”
And I suppose it’s possible that some of those factors played a part. But mainly, as we know, it was Corkness.
They don’t always harness it, the footballers, but it was hanging menacingly in the air all afternoon last Sunday, unsettling the Kerry lads.
And once it’s released, there’s no putting Corkness back in the bottle.
The commemorative double has never been more on. They have spent the week lecturing Kerry on the finer points of football. They now consider it an outrageous affront that every match from here on in isn’t played in the Páirc, the best field ever planted.
They are asking if Cork have ever been beaten in championship while the Holly Bough is on the streets. Barry’s have brought out a Tumeric tea in case the place becomes too inflamed.
Kieran Kingston is understandably wary that a hurling team cannot live on Corkness alone. He is adamant that Tipp will be “raging-hot favourites” today. He is trying to convince them they are underdogs. But there is no need. He might as well ride it all the way now.
There is no bigger bounce than an infusion of Corkness and it may well be the only known force powerful enough to counter Limerick’s certainty.
