Cork need more than a new coach
On the trains and roads south, Cork’s football community — such as it is — delved into sentence-joiners and prepositions as if underachievement was something they’ve only stomached since 2007, when the Aghada man took charge.
One All-Ireland title later — “there’s an awful lot of counties would love to have one”, Counihan argued — Cork again finds itself in top-table company but undermined by its systematic failure to grasp what’s required to keep them there.
Few could argue the squad-sheet for Saturday’s All-Ireland quarter-final with Dublin was an impressive collation of talent, but when that group continually comes up short, it begs a deeper question of the modus operandi involved at coaching level in the county. Where once, Cork people railed at Mick O’Dwyer for labelling them the second best team in the country, now they have to listen to the view that they have the best and deepest panel in football. Really? Jim Gavin’s Dublin squad may be champions-in-waiting this season, but to latch onto Saturday’s opposition for solace only continues the unsatisfactory storyline of football underachievement in Cork.
Cork will always have its greater passion for hurling to present in football’s prosecution chamber but the county is big and competitive enough to devise a workable twin-track approach. The lack of travelling support for the footballers is inexplicably employed as a crutch as if fans actually make a pass or score a goal.
The truth is Cork football doesn’t just need a new management team for 2014, it needs a systematic overhaul and rethink of football coaching in the county, a skills-based vision which relies less on impressive physical specimens and more on the game’s skills-set and volumes of tactical inventiveness.
The likes of Michael Shields and Paddy Kelly and Colm O’Neill and Ciarán Sheehan haven’t just earned that, they’re entitled to it. There are many traditionally powerful GAA counties experiencing the cyclical downturn of player talent that dilutes their competitiveness, but it’s a while since Cork can use this as a legitimate excuse.
The necessary change won’t happen quickly. Cork coaches work off the same template that keeps producing a facsimiled player and until a time when that culture and philosophy is rigorously reappraised, the county’s football frustration will remain.
The likes of Brian Cuthbert and John Cleary should be in the frame to replace Counihan but whether they are sufficiently detached from a flawed development system that is moulding such an identifiable prototype in Cork is a moot point. The development squad structure in Cork is fine in itself, but the methodology employed therein merits reexamination.
Should Cork now be looking outside the county for a coach that will take its football in a new direction? Someone who won’t just bring about a top-down shift in culture but will also devise a bottom-up coaching structure that will buttress a long-term improvement in Cork football fortunes? Nobody within the existing system will encourage such a debate as it undermines their own scope for progress. This may require more a quiet revolution than evolution but someone has to take the lead. The available evidence and philosophies of those charged with keeping Cork successful doesn’t augur well. But it’s a legitimate discussion for a county even as GAA-steeped as Cork. The likes of Kerry, Kilkenny and Tipperary may not have travelled that road, but other powerhouses like Galway, Limerick and Dublin have.
If anything, the five-point margin of defeat to Dublin was kind to Counihan and Cork. Dublin missed a clatter of goal chances and had a penalty denied that was so obvious, one has to question the relevance of umpires who didn’t see Michael Shields scoop the ball up in the small square as Dublin peppered Alan Quirke’s sitting room.
Con Houlihan, who died a year ago this weekend, would often encourage his writing proteges by telling them they were making the right mistakes.
On Saturday in Croke Park, Cork kept making the wrong mistakes. Tactically and individually. Counihan confirmed afterwards that the defensive structure he trialled in the league was abandoned on the basis that he didn’t have the players to enact it. That is fine. But if a team is going to have more use of the ball, they have to take greater care of it. They have to know how to take greater care of it. Cork’s midfield was nuked in the first period; whether that is the fault of Quirke’s kick-outs or of Pearse O’Neill and Alan O’Connor, people will make their own mind, but the thoughtless turnovers was only the start of it. Reckless defending, poor awareness of peripheral problems, wasted possession. A blind man could discern that Counihan’s management team believed Dublin’s full-back line vulnerable to an aerial bombardment, but the supporting cast to Sheehan was too haphazard even if his presence seemed to confirm Counihan’s hunch. Their most talented playmaker, Patrick Kelly, remained an unused sub though Counihan indicated it was injury problems on the field and not Kelly’s readiness for battle that precluded the Ballincollig man from entering the fray.
It’s not all down to management. The case of Eoin Cadogan continues to perplex. From one of the most dynamic free spirits in the game, the dual talent now looks like someone going through a pre-season slog in August. He was removed at half-time in the quarter-final, fortunate in some regard his defensive lapses weren’t fully punished by Bernard Brogan and friends.
After Brogan hit the post, Quirke denied MacAuley and Paul Flynn blazed over, Dublin still managed a 0-9 to 0-7 half-time lead before Jack McCaffrey put daylight between the sides with the game’s — indeed the evening’s — only goal. Much like Tony McEntee, of this parish, achieved while in charge of Crossmaglen, Jim Gavin is determined to prove that modern day football need not be toxic. It has to be more than coincidence he has employed rugby’s creative use of attacking mismatches whereby centres and wings search out the stray front rows for exploitation. McCaffrey’s running lines — remember he’s a wing-back — took him down Alan O’Connor’s channel too often for Cork’s liking. Eventually they would pay.
However Cork, in spite of themselves, were never far enough behind to throw in the towel. Daniel Goulding would have expected better of himself than to blast a 58th minute goal chance over the bar and a minute later Paudie Kissane had a clearer sight of goal, but didn’t even manage the minor consolation. Earlier Sheehan and Pearse O’Neill were blocked for goal chances; ditto Brian Hurley in the first half.
All-Ireland champions convert those chances.
Gavin, again employing the language of rugby, said the Dublin players would critique their own failings ahead of the semi-final with Kerry, but there’s very little wrong with the Leinster champions.
Searching for weakness to exploit will be an intriguing task, but lack of pace isn’t one of them. Given the impressions made by Dean Rock and co, neither is their bench.
Whether they would be as clinical and ruthless on less possession is an interesting debate, one which Tyrone enlivened with a 0-14 to 0-12 win over Monaghan in the first All-Ireland quarter-final.
Where Stephen Gollogly lacked the stone-eyed coldness to take a gifted goal chance three minutes into the second half, Tyrone’s Sean Cavanagh showed no such hesitation when he wrestled Conor McManus out of a clear goal chance 12 minutes later. Studio lights were hardly necessary as Joe Brolly lit up the RTÉ post-game analysis with a withering put down of Cavanagh’s exploitation of the rules. Brolly is no stranger to chamber grandstanding but it is difficult to dissociate yourself from his sentiment — not least given Cavanagh’s previous. The imminent introduction of a black card into the referee’s arsenal is scant consolation to Malachy O’Rourke, but he has already shown himself to be a coach with little regard for excuses.
Tyrone, Mickey Harte and Cavanagh march on, meanwhile, with their semi-final referee acutely aware now that rugby league (as Brolly calls it) is now as much a part of the GAA lexicon as the blanket defence.
* The irony of the Cavanagh decision is that the referee, Cormac Reilly, and his assistants, Conor Lane and Barry Cassidy, deserve credit for spotting and punishing sneaky off-the-ball trips earlier in the game by Tyrone’s Conor Clarke and Monaghan’s Kieran Hughes.
