Michael Moynihan: Size, imbalance and old baronial divisions all factors in Cork’s dilemma
Together as one?: The Cork team during the National Anthem before the Munster GAA Hurling Senior Championship Round 1 match between Cork and Limerick at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork.
The Cork senior hurlers face Waterford in the Munster championship tomorrow with their season on the brink.
The Cork senior footballers got within 12 points of Kerry in the Munster SFC semi-final, while the two U20 sides were beaten within a few days of each other. The minor hurlers fell at home to Clare, while the county minor footballers lost to a fancied Kerry side on Thursday evening.
If nothing else the last couple of weeks have boosted the cottage industry in think pieces on Cork GAA's travails. All over again.
You can produce statistics to rationalise Cork’s situation - the maligned footballers have won as many All-Irelands as Kerry since 2010, for instance - but that doesn’t dull the strong sense that Cork should be doing better given its size, its tradition and history, its resources.
One at a time, then.
Is that size part of the problem? Is co-ordinating over two hundred clubs simply too much for one county to manage?
Cork is the largest county in Ireland and has almost 550,000 inhabitants - far more than many other counties which are more successful on the playing field. Internally Cork relies on the old baronial divisions in an effort to impose some kind of order on the thousands of games that have to be run, but is that a viable structure in the age of round-robins and second-chance championships at several levels, even with a split season?
Other issues arise such as the imbalance of populations between the divisions, and resulting implications for playing standards, not to mention the issue of the city itself.
For instance, the area that now legally constitutes Cork city is divided between four different divisions. Is this the best way to use the largest population base in the county, which should be its principal playing base?
The underage development squads are a parallel example of Cork not using its size to good effect. The county’s successes at underage levels are trumpeted on a near-annual basis: a clean sweep of the seven underage titles on offer in hurling in 2015, four titles out of seven in hurling in 2016, and so on.
Are those squads fulfilling their essential purpose? Titles are admirable but surely inevitable given the sheer number of players available at those grades in Cork, but how many players are really ‘developed’ in those squads for senior duty?
In both hurling and football at senior level Cork teams are regularly pinpointed as lacking size and power in comparison with other counties. Whether Kerry in football or Limerick in hurling, opponents have had the upper hand physically on Cork in recent years.
Surely, then, the underage squads should be yielding players who have been developed specifically to address that deficit?
Other counties seem happy to bring through the one or two players from their underage structures who are ready almost immediately for intercounty combat. It doesn’t appear to be as important to those counties to rack up titles at U-14 level because development is the most important part of the equation.
This relates closely to tradition, another attribute Cork has managed to weaponise against itself. Focusing on the achievements of the past has been easier than forging a new tradition which is badly needed - one of elite coaching.
Relying on coaches to emerge from the club championships in a kind of Darwinian game show clearly doesn’t work in the modern age, or at least not for Cork.
By definition the coach or manager who coaxes an ageing club side to a long-awaited junior or intermediate title may be unsuited to taking a county minor side, for instance; reversing the conditions, is managing successful U14 county teams - see above - good preparation for an adult intercounty side?
Training and upskilling new and innovative coaches is easier said than done, particularly when many Cork clubs employ an outside coach. This drains club finances, which has implications for other operations within the club, but, more importantly from our perspective, what is the benefit to the club when that outside coach moves on?
How many outside coaches truly leave a legacy behind at one of their temporary postings which helps to bring other coaches through that club - and helps in turn to create the pool of good coaches needed at higher levels?
The last element we mentioned is resources. The most successful counties of recent years - Limerick in hurling, Dublin in football (and Tyrone last year) - are well managed and resourced, places where the focus is on helping the flagship county teams to succeed.
That last point can be refined somewhat: different areas of responsibility may drift in and out of focus, but there is never any doubt that the senior intercounty sides take precedence in terms of resources in the broadest sense of that term.
One pyrrhic dividend from the recent Ed Sheeran mess is the fact that the ‘Cork teams are not affected by the Páirc Uí Chaoimh overspend’ line, laughable as it always was, has finally been vaporised.
If reports of the hurlers’ struggles to get into the stadium for a training session for the Limerick game are accurate, then the concerts were doubly damaging to their prospects. Not only did Cork have to yield home advantage for the Munster championship game against Clare - a game they eventually lost in neutral Thurles by two points - those difficulties in getting into Páirc Uí Chaoimh for their championship opener hardly aided preparations for the visit of the All-Ireland champions.
The political ramifications - GAA politics, that is - of such developments can be addressed another day along with other topics such as age grading in Cork. Or refereeing styles in Cork. Or administration in Cork.
The fact that there is bound to be another day for such discussions tells its own story.
