While Cork compromise, Tipp win
With at least one gold medal winner at each of the last nine Olympics, Bill Sweetenham — an expert on winning as much as swimming — made it clear that he has no time for the word trotted out so often during the last couple of Cork strikes, ‘compromise’.
“I hate it,” he told fellow coaches attending his workshop in Dublin recently.
“Compromise is what two people agree on that neither of them want. Anytime I’ve compromised it’s come back and bit me fairly on the backside. Compromise is what other people do that allows me to beat them.”
Sweetenham is Australian but his comments could just as easily have been said by Liam Sheedy after a few pints. Within days of becoming Tipperary manager, Sheedy privately admitted to me his vision was to replicate the O’Grady-Allen model that Cork had dismantled.
Ever since, Tipp have been winning while Cork have been compromising and never did it more obviously come back to bite them on the backside than in Saturday’s tepid exit to Galway.
After Gerald McCarthy finally resigned in March 2009, everyone was so fatigued that the process to appoint his successor went largely without scrutiny.
The reality is, the post-strike settlement — if you could call it that — was hardly strike neutral.
After McCarthy’s departure, an influential GAA journalist proposed that a three-man committee should appoint a successor. The three names he suggested to Páraic Duffy were John Fenton, Jimmy Barry-Murphy and Ray Cummins. A few days later two of those three men were in situ, Denis Coughlan on board instead of Cummins.
During the strike Coughlan publicly supported Gerald McCarthy. Fenton publicly made some unflattering remarks about the players. Barry-Murphy kept his feelings private, but even if they had been sympathetic to the players that would still have left him in a minority. The committee’s criteria was also compromised: it was as if they weren’t so much looking for the most outstanding candidate as the most acceptable and least offensive, especially to the board.
No such sensitivities were at play when it came to filling the next most important managerial position in Cork hurling. The county board gave the U21 job to Ger Fitzgerald, a selector to McCarthy who the 08 senior panel never warmed to.
If he were to succeed Denis Walsh, there’s hardly a survivor from that 08 squad that would play for him.
The players have to take some responsibility for Saturday’s appalling display and the painful decline of recent years; looking at some of them against Galway persisting with that “tippy-tappy” hurling, they seemed in as much a time warp as their county board. But mostly we feel sorry for them.
Is there an older 28-year-old in the country than John Gardiner? The last strike aged him, drained him, just as it has nearly all his colleagues.
Little changed after Gerald resigned. The clubs backed off, the self-sabotage continued, the same sick culture remains. Cork football might be thriving but even its insiders will admit it’s hanging by a thread. What happens when Conor Counihan goes?
At the same meeting as his name was recommended as team manager, the first name floated by one of the two club representatives present was Bob Honohan, the Central Council rep, before Frank Murphy caught the look of disbelief on the faces of the two players present and asked who was on their list.
Even if Denis Walsh were to do the right thing and be replaced by the right man, Cork hurling also needs a progressive new county secretary and a progressive director of hurling operations.
Leave aside Tipp’s excellence in hurling; look at their approach to football. They want to appoint a director of football. They have a mission to reach an All-Ireland senior final by 2020. What’s Cork GAA’s vision for 2020?
On last Sunday’s Take Your Point on RTÉ Radio One, a triumphal Tipperary supporter claimed Lar Corbett and Eoin Kelly were reaping the benefits of accepting the managers they were given.
Beyond the fact the first strike prompted Cork to reach the next four All-Irelands and the second strike was the trigger for the footballers to win six major trophies, the caller missed the point.
Tipp didn’t have to go on strike because their board weren’t looking to sabotage them with another year of Babs. They replaced him with a good man who had served his apprenticeship. Tommy Dunne was one of the players who successfully sought the removal of Michael Doyle as team manager after just a year. In Cork he’d have been a striker. In Tipp he’s the current senior coach, aged only 37.
Meanwhile, Ger Cunningham is a month away from his 50th birthday, still yet to manage Cork. Unless it finally and fully reforms, Cork hurling could go the way of another old imperial power and it’s not Tipp hurling. Rather, it’s Cavan football.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
