Winning in Munster not the be-all and end-all
It marks Clare and Cork’s fourth meeting in that timeframe but there’s something unique about what’s in store.
For the first time in the history of the Munster championship, two counties will meet in the competition having reached the previous year’s All-Ireland final.
Munster affairs don’t come more novel or with such anticipation.
Clare and Tipperary, the only other all-Munster All-Ireland final, never followed up on their 1997 clash the following year as the latter were humbled by Waterford at the provincial semi-final.
However, the Banner have found Cork able to live up to their side of the bargain and provide a repeat of last September’s classics, which were, incidentally, only the second all-backdoor finals.
But what exactly is on the line at Semple Stadium aside from the chance for revenge in Cork’s case or reinforcement in Clare’s?
Munster is no more a solid platform to higher echelons. In fact, winning it should carry a health warning in the latter stages of the Championship just as finishing runners-up should too.
Not since Cork in 2005 have the Munster champions done the double. Cork were the last runners-up in the province to go all the way in 2004.
The illness seems to be spreading to Leinster too where Kilkenny were the last team to raise both the Bob O’Keeffe and Liam MacCarthy Cups in the same season in 2011.
The average number of games per All-Ireland winning team excluding replays over the last five years stands at over five.
Just as Sunday marks almost the one-year anniversary of last year’s semi-final, it’s close to 12 months since the evening of Miwadi and biscuits in Davy Fitzgerald’s home when Clare to a man realised losing to Cork didn’t necessarily mean all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Sure, there was pain but not enough for Fitzgerald to shut himself off from the outside world as he and Anthony Daly have often been fond of doing after Championship defeats.
Fitzgerald and his father, county secretary Pat, had spoken earlier last year about the difficulty in beating Cork twice — in the Division 1 relegation final and the possibility of meeting them in a Munster semi-final.
He argued he couldn’t see them winning both games, which probably explained why he wasn’t so downhearted about losing to them last June. His team had created seven goal chances.
“Normally it takes me a day or two to get over things. It can hit me very badly. Then I was thinking of the match and I felt we weren’t as bad as I initially thought. Then, just to confirm it, which I normally never do, I looked at the game two or three times and the more I looked at it the more I saw that for 50 to 55 minutes we weren’t that bad. We created more goal chances in that game than any other in the last number of years.”
Sunday shouldn’t tell us anything different to what we already know. Clare remain tactically astute but have been idle for some time now. Cork? No other team possess better stickmen but they are still struggling to find goals — none in half of their eight games this year. Although, when they don’t score any they usually don’t concede them either — three clean sheets.
The same rule Fitzgerald applied to Cork last year remains intact. “I think they’ll be like us for a few years: they’ll have good times and bad times. They’ll have more good than bad days though and I think it’s important to give them their time. There’s a lot of young lads in there as well.”
Two Munster wins for Cork in the space of seven days could blow their cover as genuine All-Ireland champions but then the province isn’t as reliable a yardstick as it used to be. Whatever the result on Sunday, all won’t be lost for the vanquished. This is Clare v Cork. Not much more than that but then does it have to be?
