Clare needed grenade to add to the hail of bullets
The best one can do is to point to the afternoon’s hinge moment. Eight minutes left, the underdogs three up. Cathal McInerney’s attempt from the left comes back off the crossbar and Podge Collins fails to find the net with his foot. Cork sweep down the field and 21 seconds later Pa Cronin has the ball in the net.
Is it a four-point swing? Is it a six-point swing? Decide for yourself. But the odds against Clare playing a match in the next 20 years when precisely the same sequence of events unfolds are astronomical. To a large degree, then, they were simply unlucky that the game’s big moment went against them.
Sometimes we scrabble for deep, revelatory answers when no such answers exist. Two days ago Clare produced one of the finest September performances of pure hurling in the annals of the sport. They didn’t win – and we want to, need to, must know why that was.
The proper reaction is not to get hung up. Occasionally freakish games, or at any rate games with freakish finishes, occur. Every now and then there comes an afternoon when it’s not so much the teams are playing the game but the game is playing the teams. This was one such afternoon. If that’s too simplistic a solution, tough.
What finger can possibly be pointed in Clare’s direction and why? It wasn’t they failed to get the trip, that they started with a bang and finished with a whimper. As the accompanying table shows, their performance was notable for its marked evenness; they hit a minimum of 0-5 in every quarter. Keeping her lit. Failure to react to the Cork goals? Not so either. Clare’s riposte to the concession of each goal was to score the next point.
Really, the only mild criticism one could aim at them, Patrick Kelly’s positioning for the first and third goals aside, was their insistence on living on points alone. Nothing wrong with that in the main. Contrary to the cliché, goals don’t win matches; points do.
But what goals do is bury opponents who are hanging in there. In their hammer of the gods pomp a few years back, Kilkenny knew exactly when to toss in a goal, and frequently a two-goal blast, to accompany and add value to the points. The grenade to accompany the hail of bullets. Clare have not yet got the hang of, or perhaps grasped the importance of, that trick. If they don’t it may well be the one obstacle that prevents them from becoming a truly great side.
If ever there was a match whose post-mortem demanded bouquets rather than brickbats, however, this was it. A dubious achievement it may sound, but the Banner set a new benchmark in terms of non-winning September performances. Galway hit 2-21 against Cork in 1990 but lost by three points after a defensive meltdown in the second-half. Tipperary hit 0-23 against Kilkenny in 2009 but lost by five, unable to cope with the late kick of opponents seeking four in-a-row.
Sloppy defending cost Davy Fitz’s team here, yes, but a defensive meltdown it wasn’t. Cork produced a late kick but it didn’t wither them. Domhnall O’Donovan’s equaliser arrived because the Clare players were hardwired to look for and find one another when the cauldron was boiling over. And they did.
The previous final it most resembled was the drawn encounter of 1959. Waterford were by a distance the superior team and kept knocking over the points; Kilkenny scored five goals that kept them in it. In the end it was Waterford who needed a deflected late goal to secure a draw, 1-17 to 5-5.
The good news for Clare folk is that Waterford won the replay well.
It as though Clare have emerged fully formed, without an intervening chrysalis stage. Although Tipperary hurled splendidly against Kilkenny as underdogs in 2009, they had two Munster titles under Liam Sheedy to their name by then. Clare, in contrast, didn’t reach the 2012 All-Ireland quarter-finals. Sunday was the equivalent of last season’s Cheltenham bumper winner – not even the novice chase winner but the bumper winner — going for the Gold Cup at the first time of asking.
On a personal level it was a triumph for Davy Fitz in everything but the result. Five years after being on the wrong end of the most chastening defeat in modern All Ireland history he sent out a team that gave one of the most glorious exhibitions in All-Ireland history, ancient or modern. That happened because he embraced the occasion and emboldened hisplayers to do the same.
He didn’t keep the handbrake on. He didn’t try to be too clever by half or get tangled up in tactical nets of his own construction; hence the return to 15 on 15. Instead he had faith in his players and sent them out to hurl. And they hurled. Oh, how they hurled, all touch and swagger and bounce and sidestep and enlightened ball use.
There was one other very good reason why they didn’t win. Cork. Cork and their tenacity and their race memory and their patience. The still-reigning All-Ireland champions dodged a bullet, incidentally.
Clare would have bobbed and weaved and danced patterns around the Kilkenny of 2013, picking off their points until the referee stopped the fight to save the ageing holders further punishment.
Still, for their own sake it was as well that Cork didn’t sneak it at the death. Because it would have been vaguely unsatisfying in the circumstances. Because they didn’t play well enough for long enough to have merited it. Because in big-picture terms they didn’t need it; Cork will never need a senior All Ireland in the way Waterford needed Sunday’s minor All Ireland. And because to beat a Clare team that hurled as gorgeously as they did would have been the hurling equivalent of killing Bambi. No blame should attach to Stephen Moylan. He might have wasted that late line ball, but that was far from the worst scenario.
Imagine he’d patted it five metres to a Clare defender who began the move that led to the levelling point... Instead he put it wide and Cork were facing the puckout with time up. Perfect.
At that instant Cork were seconds away from a third win in a row that would have swung, to a greater or lesser extent, on a red card or the lack thereof. Henry Shefflin in the quarter-final, Ryan O’Dwyer in the semi-final and Shane O’Neill here. If Pat Horgan was unfortunate to be sent off in the Munster final, that piece of ill luck has been effaced, and then some, in the interim.
In a fortnight’s time Cork will have the chance to play better and to win without ifs, buts and might-have-beens. Great. Can anyone wait?
