Maintaining dual mandate at heart of Cork’s woes
“Where are we going with the game?” In the wake of a miserable weekend for Cork GAA, we’ll start there. The Cork hurlers were destroyed by Galway on Sunday, losing by 12 points, and the Cork footballers were well beaten by Kildare on Saturday evening — the eventual margin of defeat was nine points.
Yesterday on Leeside, there was plenty of gloom to go around. Take the specifics: Cork’s six-day turnaround for the Kildare game is getting a lot of attention. What isn’t is the Munster Council’s reluctance to fix the provincial football final replay for the night before the Munster hurling final, which would have given the losing team a two-week break to the qualifiers.
That hasn’t been manager Brian Cuthbert’s only problem. The hostility of certain clubs to his plans has not helped him develop his team this season, and neither did the disciplinary breach which led to three players being dropped in the run-in to the Kildare game.
For his hurling counterpart, the dynamic is different: Jimmy Barry-Murphy is viewed as above criticism in Cork yet for the second year in a row his team has bowed out meekly, falling away to a 10-point defeat against Tipperary last year, a dozen behind Galway last weekend.
The similarity in how those two seasons have fizzled out raises serious questions about the team’s preparation and level of fitness, particularly in the face of Galway’s power on Sunday.
Those are the headlines. What’s the fine print in Cork sinking to this level?
Dónal Óg Cusack was loud in his criticism of Cork officials last Sunday evening, and as the power in the county, the buck ultimately lands on their desks.
Yet there’s another angle to Cork’s current problems which no-one wishes to address.
By taking the GAA’s mandate to heart and promoting Gaelic football and hurling seriously, it’s inevitable Cork will fall between two stools.
Last weekend was the classic end game to years of taking both codes seriously: over 48 hours in Thurles you could have had one fully competitive inter-county football team in action in red and white, or you could have had one fully competitive inter-county hurling team.
Clearly, however, you can’t have both.
Unlike the counties which lead the honour rolls in All-Ireland senior titles, in Cork the less influential code is neither breezily dismissed nor the subject of token lip service.
The professionalisation of standards of preparation now mean that players can’t fulfil meaningful senior inter-county duty in both Gaelic football and hurling.
This point goes deeper than ‘this player should be on the football/ hurling team’ argument, though. The real damage being done by Cork taking the GAA’s mission statement to heart is at underage level.
Cusack’s damning chart of underage failure on Cork’s can be linked to that dual mandate, and in particular the development squad template, because promising kids on Leeside tend to end up on both squads.
Teenagers with size, athleticism and aggression end up serving their schools, their clubs and a county development squad all over the country, of course; the difference in Cork is that the workload of training and games is doubled, with the player suffering all the drawbacks of overloading and few of the advantages of elite preparation. As a dual county — correction: a real dual county — Cork should abandon the development squad model and move to a template more suited to the specific challenges the county faces.
One in which the best players don’t slog through football and hurling development squads when they’re finished with their eight to 10 other teams.
In that regard, consider Cork’s nine Munster U21 football titles since 2001, and its one All-Ireland senior title in the same period. Then check those team lists for players who became senior hurlers, not footballers.
You can already hear those beyond the Rebel borders: ‘Ah, so that’s the problem, Cork are ’ Sniggering misses the point, though.
There are specific Cork issues which need to be addressed, but there’s also the structural contradiction that comes with participating fully in Gaelic games.
Maybe that’s the one change to be made to Johnny Clifford’s plea: where are we going with the games?
