Kieran Shannon: Can Cork close the door on opening day blues?
Luke Fahy of Cork in action against Joe O’Connor of Kerry in the McGrath Cup final at Pairc Ui Rinn.
Although this weekend was Malachy O’Rourke’s first time scaling the All-Ireland peak, he’s long operated at football’s highest altitude and for him Cork’s Colm O’Neill was the best teacher of how thin the air there can be.
In 2015 after O’Rourke had guided Monaghan to two consecutive promotions, they were in Castleblaney playing a Cork team that were on their way to making a fourth Division One final in five seasons. Monaghan were on top for much of the game but whenever it looked like they were about to pull away from Cork O’Neill would lasso them right back.
“One slip at the back, Colm O’Neill got the ball and stuck it in the bottom corner,” O’Rourke would recall after going on to win that year’s Ulster final. “You were thinking, ‘Frig me, that’s a good goal there.’ Then we got on top again, until same thing: one mistake, O’Neill – bang, corner of the net.”
Ryan Wylie had been Monaghan’s man of the match, keeping O’Neill to barely a handful of touches and yet with that O’Neill had converted into 2-2 from play. “That was the day we thought, ‘It’s ruthless here.’”
A couple of years later though Cork themselves had slipped out of Division One. They haven’t been back there since. And in a way the rot started when the personification of ruthlessness had a rare miss on a day he again underlined just how accurate he was.
In the first weekend of February 2017 Cork made the haul up to Salthill to play their first game in the second tier since beating Monaghan, under the management of Banty McEnaney, eight years earlier.
Ten minutes into the second half of a low-scoring game, O’Neill came off the bench and duly kicked four sublime points from play. With with the final kick of the game though and the sides level, O’Neill’s attempt from a deadball 40 metres out drifted just wide. With Galway having been two points down in the closing minutes, it felt like a point gained rather one lost for the home side; the opposite for the visitors.
Galway would go on to beat Fermanagh the following week and win promotion. Cork, in contrast, would lose to Kildare the following week and finish up in mid-table.
Cork haven’t won their opening game of Division Two since. In 2018 they lost by two goals to Tipperary in the new Páirc Uí Chaoimh and duly stuttered to another mid-table finish. In 2019 they drew in their opening game in Enniskillen – and duly were relegated on scoring difference.
The one year they’ve won their initial league game of a campaign was in 2020 when they comfortably saw off Offaly – and duly roared to promotion from Division Three.
There has never been a league to start as late as that of 2021 and unfortunately for Cork and their suspended manager Ronan McCarthy they were slower out of the traps in Thurles than Kildare. Though Cork would subsequently win the remaining three games of that league campaign, that slow start against Kildare would again scupper their chances of promotion.
The following year in Keith Ricken’s first year in charge they’d be drilled by six points up in Roscommon; then last year, in John Cleary’s first full league game in charge, by four points at home to Meath. For all they’d improve in that league campaign – winning well in Newbridge and Ennis, rattling the Dubs at home in the Páirc – another opening-round defeat had meant they were again having to make up lost ground they’d never quite recapture.
During the summer the Cleary project would make further progress, winning an All-Ireland quarter-final spot by claiming some genuine scalps along the way, namely Mayo and Roscommon. Now the next step is apparent: to get back to Division One and operating weekly – perennially – at the heights O’Rourke’s Monaghan would acclimatise to and ultimately benefit from and thrive in.
The fixture-makers couldn’t have made it more challenging for them though. First day out and they’ve to go to Ballybofey to face Jim McGuinness’s Donegal, themselves surely aspiring to get back to Division One.
With Armagh also in the second tier and desperate to escape it, Division Two will be as intense and competitive as any year it is renowned for, and more so than Division One.
McGuinness knows how tough an opening league game can be. In 2011 in his first incarnation his team had to come from eight points down against Sligo to escape with a draw. “Sligo were a really well-drilled side under Kevin Walsh,” he’d write in his autobiography.
Now Cork are a well-drilled side under Walsh’s coaching. Forget Kerry-Derry meeting again, Cork-Donegal is the game of the weekend, and should Cork win, it could shape their year and even decade.
