Patrick Horgan: Ben O’Connor’s suggestion previous Cork teams didn’t work hard struck me as odd
Cork manager Ben O'Connor barks out the orders. Pic: INPHO/Tom O'Hanlon.
Did the Cork-Clare game, or result, come as a surprise? I think so.
I certainly didn’t see that Clare performance coming. In the first ten minutes they showed a good bit of appetite, they came close to a couple of goals, and they should have finished off at least one of those chances. They were giving the Cork defence enough of it and we looked set for a great battle.
Then Cork just took over, and Clare had little enough to offer in return.
Taking a step back from the game, what were we really expecting from Clare? They got a good beating from Limerick and just got over the line against Waterford.
They beat Tipp well in a one-off game, which was what they really needed to get through, but Sunday means they’ve had two games where they’ve been well off the pace against Cork and Limerick. I think that’ll be a concern for them.
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Will Sunday have an impact on their momentum? No, on the basis that you can’t generate momentum from one game - in their case the win over Tipperary. They were disappointing on Sunday and they have a lot of work to do between now and the quarter-final, which could potentially be Dublin.
That’d be a tough assignment because the Dubs are a team who’ve been growing through the championship, building on every performance, which I’ll come back to later.
Cork weren’t at full strength - I wouldn’t describe it as an injury crisis, but Cork are down a couple of very significant players. There’s a lot of discussion of the strength of panels, and Cork’s strength in depth is certainly being tested.
Having gone so far in the last couple of seasons, though, there’s a lot of experience in the Cork camp - even the lads who are being brought on usually have had plenty of game time in the past.
On Sunday they emptied the bench and got a nice return from Shane Kingston in particular, who hit three good points: you can’t ask for more than that. Granted the game was more or less over when the Cork subs were coming in, but when you bring in a replacement you want him to get to the pitch of the game and contribute immediately. Shane did that and showed he’s well worth his place on the match day 26.
Cork are in a really good place. A game like Sunday gives the whole group a lift because everyone played well, the team looks sharp and fast - that was obvious in the way Cork went after John Conlon.
He covered so much for his other defenders against Tipp but he had enough on his own plate Sunday and couldn’t help his teammates as much (and to be fair to Clare, Darragh Lohan was also a big loss, having played so well the last day).
After the game Ben O’Connor said Cork had been known down through the years as having nice players who didn’t work hard, and he would only play lads who’d work hard.
I don’t know if I agree with Ben there, because it suggests previous management teams put up with fellas who didn’t try, or that his current players are trying hard now but didn’t in the past.
That struck me as odd given most of the team he has now have won Munster finals, league finals, and reached two All-Ireland finals; you don’t get to that level without trying hard.
In the other game Limerick were very good, very efficient, and I’ll talk about them in more detail before the Munster final. Tipperary had nothing to play for but they went out and fought anyway and certainly didn’t let themselves down.
They’ll be very disappointed with the last few weeks, they’re a proud hurling county, but there’s a lot for them to take out of the last eighteen months. Overall Tipp are a young team with more youngsters coming, so they’ll bounce back and be a threat in the next couple of years.
Liam Cahill was strong enough in defending his players last weekend after the game, and I suppose now there’ll be the usual talk about this being the end of the road for a few of the Tipp players.
I don’t agree with that at all. Just because a player’s a certain age his time is up and he has to move on? That makes no sense.
I expect plenty of that kind of discussion about lads like Noel McGrath, for instance, and if he wants to call it a day then fair dues to him.
But something you can’t build in the gym or learn from doing laps of the field is what Noel has upstairs: that hurling mind, that vision to pick out the right option. He’s always been a couple of steps ahead of other players, between the stick work and the vision, so I wouldn’t be in any rush to get rid of him, or a few more players of his vintage, even if Tipp had a bad year this year.
Dublin-Kilkenny was probably the biggest game of the year in terms of what the result meant, but it’s been coming. For the last couple of months every observer seems to have pointed to Kilkenny’s problems.
They had a bit of a bounce against Wexford and there was a sense of ‘have they got themselves in order?’ In reality they’ve struggled all through the championship. They haven’t been scoring enough, pure and simple, which is strange for a county that has always had the forwards to keep the scoreboard ticking over. And that’s proved fatal in the end.
To be fair to Derek Lyng, they’ve had a couple of injuries and a couple of players are away travelling, so he hasn’t always had a full squad to pick from. Not qualifying for the All-Ireland championship is going to mean a lot of soul-searching in Kilkenny for the next few months, however.
Dublin were far more composed and always looked like they knew what their plan was. For example, when John Hetherton started at full-forward the outside players knew to keep him supplied with ball which suited him, and they did that from the start. Brian Hayes also dropped in to sweep instead of Liam Rushe and he slotted into that role perfectly as well.
The other big development was Offaly getting through to the All-Ireland series. They’ve been competitive in every game and deserve their shot; they may find it hard when they face the Munster runners-up but they’re getting better and better.
That’s all Johnny Kelly, their manager, will want (he has experienced men with him too in the form of Seamus Callanan and Brendan Maher, who know better than most what it takes to compete at this level).
We should have a terrific All-Ireland series, but there’s the small matter of the Munster final first.
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