Anthony Daly: Cork's new boys are putting chests out and hands up

2023 COMEBACK: Cork's Declan Dalton celebrates at the final whistle. Pic: ©INPHO/Bryan Keane

I’ll come clean and be totally honest and say I really enjoyed the Ireland-France game on Saturday. It was a quality match with some brilliant scores but normally rugby wouldn’t even enter my head the day of a hurling match, especially a Clare-Limerick game.

Hurling is my absolute passion but when rugby muscles its way into my headspace on the day of a local derby, you have to accept this league for what it is, and how nobody can be sure of how any team is going to turn up on the day.

Of course that doesn’t apply across the board. I really enjoyed the Cork-Galway game on Sunday. At times, it was as open and loose as a challenge game. Then further south, some of Kilkenny’s defending in the first half against Tipperary was kamikaze stuff, the kind you’d rarely expect to see from Kilkenny full stop, never mind against the arch-enemy in their own backyard.

What summed up most of the weekend’s action though, was Henry Shefflin’s decision to leave Brian Concannon on the bench until the 57th minute. Concannon had only played a Fitzgibbon Cup quarter-final last Thursday, while he has a semi-final for NUIG this Thursday against UCC.

But if Henry really wanted to win the game, especially at a stage when Galway were being over-run, would he have brought Concannon on earlier? As it was, the Kilimordaly man still caused chaos when he was introduced, scoring a goal and causing consternation anytime he was on the ball close to goal.

You’d still have to say though, that Cork seem to be operating with a different mindset than most teams, which is natural when you have so many new players. What’s more, a good few of those seem to be developing into leaders.

When a small schemozzle developed near the stand midway through the second half, it was the new lads who were in Galway’s faces. Some of those new lads are fellas who have been around before but who finally seem to be sticking their hands up. Declan Dalton is the obvious one when scoring 0-8, 0-6 from play in a man of the match performance. But is Dalton going to step up and come of age after this display? He certainly looks in the best physical shape of his life to try and do so.

Pat Ryan will be delighted because another win against another top side takes the pressure off him. With Cork expected to beat Westmeath next time out, Ryan’s side could effectively be in a league semi-final with two rounds still to play. With Cork not playing in the opening round of the robin in Munster, the notion of going all out for a league title might be more appealing to Pat now than it may have been before last week’s game against Limerick.

At the outset of every year, you’d be fancying Kilkenny for a league title, purely on the basis that Brian Cody never knew any other way but to win whatever he could. We’re all still watching closely to see if Derek Lyng might bring anything different to Kilkenny but, at half-time in Nowlan Park, the match was threatening to turn into a horror show for the home side when trailing Tipp by 12 points.

Yet while Cody may be gone, the fighting qualities he instilled deep into Kilkenny’s DNA were certainly evident in Derek’s side after the break. Derek surely got his first opportunity to deliver a Codyesque blast of hair-dryer treatment at half-time. I like what I see from Liam Cahill’s Tipperary though, what a forward Jason Forde has become.

Similar to the action in Pearse Stadium, I felt the refereeing was nowhere near as strict as James Owens was in Limerick on Saturday evening, which allowed more open play in both games.

A six-point defeat flattered Clare on Saturday evening but, being honest, I wouldn’t have read too much into it if Clare had come in pumped up and won by 10 points either. Clare just weren’t at the races. They played with no fire, which is never going to work in a Clare-Limerick match.

On the other hand, saying that Clare were completely flat is also not a good enough reason to dismiss some of Limerick’s brilliant sorcery.

Clare have some big names to come back but Limerick have even more. When you look at the depth of options they have now all over the field, and the quality of some of the new players’ hurling, you’d also have to say that Limerick are a good bit further down the road than they were at this stage of last year’s league.

Clare just don’t have that depth. Saturday also underlined the importance of someone like Ryan Taylor, who two years ago wouldn’t have been considered as having the potential to be as critical to Clare as he is now. Mark Rodgers was playing less than 48 hours after a Fitzgibbon quarter-final before getting a belt and having to go off before coming back on again. Clare will have options but they need to be lucky with injuries.

Every game presented some form of evidence of how hard it is to develop any kind of consistency in this league. That was on full show in Parnell Park when Dublin looked to be cruising before hanging on for a finish, with the home side again thankful to Donal Burke for another huge haul.

Antrim will be disappointed that it took them so long to get up and running before eventually almost catching Dublin on the line. Despite Dublin getting such a huge result in Dungarvan last weekend, Micheál Donoghue will have fully appreciated how treacherous that game was on Sunday, not just in the context of steering clear of the basement, but in terms of not giving Antrim any psychological edge before the sides meet in Corrigan Park in the round robin in the summer.

Antrim already find themselves looking over their shoulders with two defeats from two games but this league is just unforgiving for sides closer to the bottom rung of the ladder.

One of the most pleasing aspects of the weekend was the displays of Antrim, Laois, and Westmeath. Laois were excellent in the first half against Waterford before eventually coming undone when Aidan Corby was red-carded early in the second half.

In Mullingar, Westmeath were only two points adrift of Wexford 10 minutes into the second half before two goals turned the game in the direction everyone expected it to go. In a league that nobody wants to win, or wants to publicly declare that anyway, it’s not outlandish to say that Cork may be the one side going against that grain.

Besides having an extra week lead-in to the championship, a lot of these new and young Cork lads appear hungry for a league medal and, more importantly, a starting jersey.