Eimear Ryan: Cork reminded us there will be good days again for us all
Cork's Robert Downey and team-mate Seán O'Leary Hayes celebrate alongside a dejected TJ Reid of Kilkenny after the All-Ireland semi-final on Sunday. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
RTÉ couldn’t have planned the day’s programming better. After Cork’s barn-storming 90-minute wrestle with Kilkenny on Sunday afternoon, they aired the brilliant documentary directly after. It was enough to make even a blow-in like me feel ready to die for the blood and bandage.
Throw in an early start to watch Kellie Harrington’s victorious bout, and I just about expired from sporting glory.
I’ve been watching this incredible summer of sport from the couch, foot propped on a pillow, a cast enclosing my ankle and shin; or in the case of club games, from the sideline, perched on a folding chair. It’s the third season out of the last four that I’ve been out with injury. This is the first time, however, that the injury wasn’t incurred through camogie, which makes it worse somehow — an unforced error.
(Was I sober, you ask, when I broke my ankle? Yes. Was I up on a skateboard at 34 years of age, indulging in an ill-conceived lockdown hobby? Also yes.)
In previous years, watching championship hurling used to be my ultimate motivation, a launchpad for getting back out on the pitch. Fuel for the fire. Grist for the mill. As I’ve gotten older, my attention to the mental side of sport has become more pronounced.
You have to talk yourself into playing well. Conjure up past glories, relive them in your mind’s eye. Tell yourself that you — yes, you — have the potential to turn a game. It’s an elaborate self-delusion, and sometimes it even works.
Having inspirational images to the forefront of my brain — like televised inter-county heroics — is a huge part of my mental preparation, and gives me a lift the next time I’m out the door to training or a match. But now that energy has nowhere to go. I feel the same impulse to get back on the pitch or out to the ball wall, but can’t scratch the itch. I have to settle instead for crutching into the kitchen to make a cuppa, the apex of my athleticism at the moment.
That said, I’m lucky that, as a writer, I take quite well to the sedentary lifestyle too.
These weeks and months of recovery are in some way an opportunity — for writing, reading, and Netflixing.
I now regret the grandiose statements I used to make like ‘If I ever break a leg, I’ll read ’ or ‘If I’m ever laid up, I’ll watch from start to finish.’
My cultural consumption has been a bit more lowbrow so far — sport excluded, of course. Compared to Cork and Kilkenny, Saturday’s semi-final was more sedate, a little easier on the blood pressure. Low-scoring for the modern age with just the one goal, Limerick gave another commanding, business-like performance. It felt like a curtain-raiser to Sunday’s 71-score bonanza. Before the game, Anna Geary was the only RTÉ pundit to call it for Cork, and even though she was honour-bound to do so, she should feel vindicated.
Kilkenny, having arguably had the smoothest run to the semi-finals out of the four teams, did that Kilkenny thing where they kept in touch, kept breathing down Cork’s neck even as the Rebels dominated open play. From placed balls, Reid proved more unflappable than Horgan — although TJ, the ultimate gentleman hurler, was also personally responsible for conceding four or five frees, unusual for him.
I must admit to screaming with glee at Adrian Mullen’s goal. When a neutral, I always root for the underdog, or the team that has had the longest intermission in success, but there is something so joyous about a forward plainly telegraphing what he is about to do and pulling it off anyway.
As if in an action movie, an automated door was closing on Kilkenny’s championship and Mullen managed to slide under in the nick of time. The audacity was thrilling.
Tim O’Mahony running out with the ball in the dying moments of normal time sent me back to a similar moment at the close of the 2017 All-Ireland camogie final. That day, Cork and Kilkenny were level seven minutes into injury time, and the Kilkenny backs tried to run out the ball in a series of short passes — as they’d been trained to do, as was their game plan.
Suddenly, Julia White intercepted and fired over a winner; O’Mahony was similarly dispossessed. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist,” is a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso that’s also applicable to sport; as important as it is to be able to work within a system, you must also know when to break with it and feck the ball up the field.
Two things stressed me out immensely. One was the amount of back-passing to Patrick Collins, clearly another plank in the Cork defensive game plan but one which leaves them vulnerable at times. At one point in the second half, Kilkenny almost overturned a back-pass and punished Cork, and you can be sure that Limerick will be ready to exploit any hesitancy around goal.
The second thing is the fact that people are debating the merits of leaving off Shane Kingston for the final. In the discourse over the past week he’s been likened to iconic closers like Billy Byrne and Shane Dowling but, with all due respect to those brilliant goal-poachers, Kingston is 23, well capable of delivering a performance for the full 70 minutes. Having scored a goal in each of Cork’s qualifiers against Clare and Dublin, his omission from the starting 15 didn’t make a huge amount of sense to begin with; with a different surname, you wonder might he have scraped through.
