Cork need to put steel fist into silk glove

When Cork finally hit a rhythm and a groove in the second quarter yesterday, everybody around me was probably thinking the same as the entire hurling community. ‘Yeah, Cork have finally got it together now. They’ve weathered the storm. They’ll drive on. They’ll win this handy.’ And the Cork players certainly seemed to think the same.

I wasn’t so sure. Tipperary were playing with much more intensity. They were largely winning the dogfight. Cork had put them on their backs with an unanswered 1-6 in nine minutes but Tipp got up and clipped the last two points of the half. They were more or less saying to Cork, ‘Hi, we’ve taken yere best shots. Ye may have hurt us. But we’re still not going anywhere.’

Tipp had that look in their eyes from the first ball. They had that edge about them that suggested that they would keep taking Cork’s best shots, and keep swinging right back at them. Cork had the breeze, and a strong one at that, to come but Cork just looked like a team that –as everyone else seemed to think – just expected it to happen. And Tipp went and made it happen.