Cusack: Why it means so much
By way of whetting his appetite, he would first view a re-run of the 2003 final in which Cork lost to their great rivals. Seeing it on tape for the first time, re-living the bad memories of the game, would be the ideal build-up to sitting back and watching the real thing.
Cusack first came on the senior panel in 1996 and took over from Ger Cunningham at the beginning of the 1999 campaign. Listening to him talk, it is apparent how obsessed he is about playing for the county, how utterly serious he is about his role in his team and how much it pains him to lose. For instance, he refers to the 2000 All-Ireland semi-final defeat by Offaly as "just a terrible thing": "we had won a great Munster championship against Tipperary. They were the last team over those two years we wanted to beat, because we had beaten all of the other big guns. Every game that this bunch of Cork players play even if it's only a game of marbles they want to win."
Getting back to the All-Ireland final again this year gives them the chance to vindicate themselves.
Deep down in their hearts, they weren't happy with last year.
A long time ago, Cusack learned to live with the pressures that goalkeeping brings. Mistakes can often be magnified and the first thing people do when a goal goes in is to look to the keeper. But, he says he has learned to live with the pressure. And, he points out that Cunningham has helped him a lot along the way and continues to.
"When I was training with Ger from '96 onwards and I said to him at the time I didn't think he was a great goal-keeping coach. That was obviously because he was playing himself and he had his own job to do. Now he has come back, I couldn't say enough about him. I speak to him every Monday after a game with all due respect to the media, I wouldn't read the papers to see how I played. Ger would be, and has been, very critical with me, things I do, or maybe the way I train. I respect that criticism. I know I'm getting that criticism and that advice from, to me, the best goalkeeper that ever lived."
A question about the vital goal which Paul Flynn 'stole' in the Munster final touches a raw nerve with him. His reaction seemed to indicate that he was hurt by some of the media comment about it. First saying that he had been forced to look at the goal anything up to 30 times since, he turned the question around to the reporter who put it, commenting: "I don't know how much you have looked at it. Maybe you should look at the positioning of every one of our players. I'd love to sit down and look at that with you, we could go through it.
"What we'd like to think is that we put procedures in place where things like that won't happen again. If you were watching it, you could see that we were worried. I was trying to see beyond the amount of people outside me, what Paul Flynn was doing. He's that kind of guy, he can do something unexpectedly. Over the last couple of years, Paul has been trying to do that on numerous occasions. Also with the new ball, guys like Paul and Eugene Cloonan realise you can put top-spin on the ball.
"And they are actually trying to do it, which is making the goalkeeper's job and the backs' job, more difficult.
"When it comes down to it, it was a free we conceded from 30 yards and I can guarantee you, there was nobody more disappointed in Cork with it than I was, or the defence.
"We learned a lot of lessons from the Waterford game. It's human nature that you learn more out of defeat than victory."
He revealed that manager Donal O'Grady had the team watch the first ten minutes of the Munster final and then the last ten minutes. It was part of their preparation for the qualifier game against Tipperary in Fitzgerald Stadium.
"You wouldn't want to be any hurling specialist or great analyst to see the different kind of styles we played in those two periods. Hopefully that was a lesson learned for us," he added.
Cusack says that the Cork players are not concerned about what they view as the peripheral issues at stake on Sunday: Kilkenny's three-in-a-row prospects and the fact that one of the counties will go ahead in the roll of honour.
"Their sole focus as Cork players is just winning the game, what O'Grady described a few weeks as their "one-in-a-row". Any of the sideshows don't really interest them.
One of the benefits from the stand-off with the County Board two years ago was the appointment of O'Grady, he pointed out. They were lucky to get a manager who stands for all the things they'd like to think they stand for: professionalism of his approach, the way the players lead their lives on and off the field. It's all about trying to ensure that everything is in place to help them perform to the best of their ability.
The players as a group reacted positively to Setanta Ó hAilpín's departure to Australia, delighted that he was given the opportunity to be what a lot of them including Cusack would love to be: a professional sportsman. And, he always believed that Brian Corcoran would re-join the squad once he had taken a decision to resume his career with Erin's Own.
"Last year after the All-Ireland final, he came back to the City West and, being the man that he is, he was there waiting for us and spent most of the night in our company. You knew that he realised things had got better, that the set-up was more professional. It's great to see him back enjoying his hurling and enjoying training, which is probably more important."
Cusack adds his voice to the growing chorus of criticism of the playing surface in Croke Park, saying it's not satisfactory. "The surface that you're playing on, training on, day in, day out, is grass all over the field and then you go on to what is probably the biggest challenge and the biggest stage in the game and the surface changes.
"It's a bit like when the GAA introduced a new sliothar. The only way I could describe it would be if you were a top-class snooker player, playing on a different cloth."
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