Déise can’t spill any more crumbs
And not just the feature event of the day: one of the feature events of the hurling summer.
Fireworks. Explosions. Trumpets. Badge-kissing. Scripted by Shakespeare, directed by Danny Boyle, starring roles by Big Dan and little Joe and the Rock and the De La Salle skinhead and the rest of them.
What was the way Brian Corcoran put it in his autobiography? “Sometimes they win. Mostly we win. Every time, hurling wins.” That captured it neatly, even if after 2006 it was Waterford who “mostly” did the winning.
It would be easy to spend half of this column lamenting what is lost and gone forever. Instead let us celebrate it. The legendary feats of Cork and Tipperary and Waterford and — above all — Wexford during the 1950s, that previous golden age of the game? They no longer stir the way they used to. They no longer stir because we lived through Cork/Waterford in the ’00, we thrilled to it and in 40 years’ time those of us still above ground will be boring the grandchildren with the rosy memories of it all.
Six successive Munster titles split equally between them from 2002 to ’07. Mullane’s hat-tricks. Ken’s salmon leaps. Corcoran’s drop-shot goals. Big Dan banging ’em in during the summer of 2007. Cork, reamed by suspension, still managing to contribute three goals to an eight-goal feast in Semple Stadium that year and coming within a pesky crossbar of getting an improbable draw.
And the climax of the drawn All-Ireland quarter-final the same summer. Remember it? A sliotar, a goal-line and Diarmuid O’Sullivan’s “big arse” (Dan’s words). You couldn’t make it up. But that was then, most of the dramatical personae have vacated the stage and Shakespeare has laid down his quill. Tomorrow’s is a drama acted by lesser lights and scripted by a lesser playwright. Nobody’s fault, just the way things are. Time devours — itself a subject the Bard was fond of devoting sonnets to, but hey, Donal O’Grady is the múinteoir around here.
Why Cork will probably win and why Waterford probably won’t? One very simple, even simplistic, reason. Cork should come by their scores a little more easily.
Or to put it another way, the aggregate of every good ball Waterford hit is likely to add up to less than the aggregate of every bad ball Waterford hit.
Thus it was at Páirc Uí Chaoimh a fortnight ago. They weren’t seven points an inferior team in the Munster final, even if Tipperary were visibly keeping something in the tank. It was a three- or four-point game. But a missed Waterford pick-up and Bonner Maher pounced to put John O’Brien through for the first goal, and a dubious free compounded by a goalkeeping error of judgement and Tipp had the killer second goal.
These are the margins. These are the crumbs Waterford cannot afford to let fall from the table. Once upon a time their bad goalkeeping or flabby defending — of which there was plenty — didn’t matter so much, not when they had Big Dan and Paul Flynn around to detonate incendiaries at the other end of the field. Once upon a time.
Like every manager, Michael Ryan can only work with what he has. He has done a decent job in his debut year. Bar a catastrophe tomorrow, nobody can accuse Waterford of underachievement in 2012. And, as the recent U21 debacle in Ennis demonstrated, it’s not that the county’s underage ranks are bulging with lads who possess the naked flame of a young Ken McGrath or an embryo Paul Flynn.
So Ryan will cross his fingers and hope that Maurice Shanahan nails every free, that Tomás Ryan brings some drive and incisiveness in front of goal, that Mullane adds a green flag to his constitutionally mandated 0-3 from play — and that no crumbs are spilled in the Déise’s own half of the field.
No question, this is an eminently winnable game for Waterford. Cork are vulnerable, or at any rate are about as good as they can be right now and harbour no illusions about that. Whether they know their best team is a moot point, but often a manager can stumble on his optimum XV through sheer wealth of outings.
Jimmy Barry-Murphy has no grounds for complaint on that count. Cork did what they usually do on the qualifier circuit (except when they meet Galway). They played the arenas, got through the gigs and now a possible stadium tour awaits.
Attribute it to race memory. They won’t kill themselves when forced to take the scenic route but they’ll always have enough for the likes of Offaly and Wexford and deep down they know it.
Hovering in the background tomorrow is the incentive that dare not speak its name. A date with Galway in an All-Ireland semi-final. Not Kilkenny. Not Tipperary. Galway.
Nothing there for Waterford to fret about, given their formidable championship record against Galway. And nothing much there for Cork, even if Galway have had the better of it against them in the championship over the past decade, to get worked up over. History and tradition forbid it.
They’ll most likely do just about enough tomorrow too, thereby bringing the prospect of a Cork/Tipp All-Ireland final ever closer. Just imagine the mutual love-in for the three weeks beforehand. Oh Lordy. The rest of us may have to leave the country.
But hopefully not before Cork and Waterford remind us of how it used to be between them.
