Rebels show courage of their convictions
It’s Roy Part II – there is no halfway house, no fence to sit astride, no non-committal position to be adopted for the purpose of avoiding unfriendly fire from either side.
No, not Jedward: the Cork hurlers.
Perhaps sensing the results might not come, some who were ‘with them’ have long argued that the team didn’t need to win big matches to justify their actions over the past few years – the fight, they said, needed to be fought, regardless of the short-term outcome.
It would be lovely if life were lived along such finely-drawn ideological lines.
But it isn’t.
It would be all fine and dandy if people would adopt admirably philosophical positions in the middle of, and in the aftermath of, such tumultuous, divisive events.
But, by and large, they don’t.
And so no-one should be under any illusions but that Cork were under enormous pressure in Páirc Uí Chaoimh yesterday.
This time, it would be conclusive: there was no disruption in the build-up, a happy camp by all accounts, and an old rival that has always tended to set Cork pulses racing.
Those who were agin’ them hoped to see them roundly beaten. Players – particularly these players – are generally sensitive to the public mood, despite what they may say when a microphone is put in front of them. They can read between the lines, discern the unarticulated thoughts.
They knew the stakes were high yesterday.
Which is why this was the most significant Cork performance since trouble, if not quite time, began. Ger Loughnane says it was the best Cork display since the one that derailed his Galway team in Thurles in 2008: in truth, it was dramatically better.
It was achieved against superior opposition, and under the shadow of a league final performance that flagged up so many worries. It was a sustained campaign of dominance, whereas Thurles featured long periods where Galway were on top, on the field and on the scoreboard.
Plus, yesterday a management gamble paid off. Denis Walsh had the courage of his convictions: before yesterday, we met few people who believed Aisake would do the damage he did.
His peppering of Pádraic Maher in the league encounter was cited here and there as a harbinger of things to come, but rarely with any great conviction. More like a covering each-way bet, nothing on the nose.
Even if Cork peter out before the cash-and-carry end of the season, they will have had a major influence on affairs: the extent of Tipperary’s discomfort in front of their own goal will not be lost on the other leading contenders.
Last night, the Aisake ploy looked like a masterplan. But Walsh must have wondered if it would ever come to anything after the league final.
Now, in that wonderful way in which a GAA season lists way too far one way and then way too far the other, a new set of pressures will descend on Aisake. He will now be the marked man: if Walsh is as shrewd as he seems to be, he will undoubtedly be setting to work on alternative strategies in the likely event that Aisake won’t be able to cause as much havoc in a big match again this season.
The messageboards are hopping already with talk that Tipperary have been following a masterplan of their own, whereby they calibrate their season to arrive full steam into August and September.
It is, at best, mere mischief: at worst, woeful nonsense that suggests last week’s Costa del Sol arrests of men in baggy jocks has resulted in no disruption to the country’s hallucinogenic pipeline.
Liam Sheedy has brought Tipp to a high level of performance over the last two seasons, and the entire emphasis for them this year is, sorry was, on staying here.
They are not Kilkenny. They are still climbing.
Taking a hammering of this magnitude from Cork sends Sheedy and his management into reverse. Previous certainties are no more: niggling hunches that have been gnawing away at them have now been proven to be true.
They are not beyond repair, but it will be a fraught journey.
