Cork and Kilkenny thrive in adversity

DOES a team learn more from defeat than victory? It’s debatable but an entirely appropriate question in the context of this year’s All-Ireland hurling final.

It’s less than 10 weeks since the thrilling exploits of Waterford and Wexford as they put Cork and Kilkenny to the sword. Since then, the venerable hurling blue-bloods have licked their wounds and benefited from the soothing balm of the qualifier route.

In both cases, it was the bitter taste of defeat that fuelled their comebacks and it’s a fear of failure that still drives them on as Sunday week’s decider approaches.

“We were told after the Wexford game to remember that losing feeling and build on that,” Kilkenny captain Martin Comerford recalled yesterday. “I suppose Cork have it as well after losing a thrilling Munster final to Waterford.”

Comerford was on the periphery of the Kilkenny panel when they last lost a championship game, to Galway in 2001, but this year’s setback was his first experience of being on a losing side on the September Road.

“It was a strange feeling, especially in the sense that we were a point or two up when Wexford got the goal and we didn’t even have the chance to puck out the ball. We had a bit of a chat the week after the Wexford match and there were a few places where things where going wrong. Having the chance to do that has stood to us over the year.”

If that loss was traumatic for Comerford and his colleagues, it paled in comparison to the shock-waves generated on Leeside after their tumultuous Munster final epic with Waterford.

The criticism in the wake of that one-point defeat was unprecedented, with management and individual players alike sniped at for their failures - real and perceived. With so much lead flying, the Cork panel did the only thing they could: keeping their heads below the parapet. “It was a bit of a shock to the system, to be beaten in the Munster final and go through the back door,” captain Ben O’Connor admitted yesterday at the Toyota Captain’s Conference in Dublin. “The big thing was the Tuesday night after the Munster final when we were going back training. It was hard to go back as we were after getting awful abuse, awful criticism off various people.

“We had a meeting before training; we talked about a few things and decided to move on from there or it would be a short summer. The way it turned out, we had a great session that night.” It’s history now, of course, and if Cork take revenge for last year’s September loss in 10 days’ time no one will dwell too long on the spate of finger-pointing that followed the game in Thurles. It still rankles with the players, though, and O’Connor feels perspective was abandoned with emotions running so high. “You don’t mind getting criticism at times, you probably deserve it, but you don’t like when it goes personal with players being singled out. People were saying to us it was the greatest Munster final of all-time, we were beaten by a point, yet we were the worst Cork team of all-time and Waterford were the best team to ever come out of the county. It just shows how fickle people are.”

For Cork, the road to redemption began when they were drawn against the aul’ enemy in the first round of the qualifiers. If ever anyone could concentrate Cork minds it was Tipperary and they entered Cork’s sights at the moment they were needed most.

“We knew ourselves that if we were going to go anywhere we would have to beat Tipperary. You might like to get a so-called handier draw but when it’s Cork and Tipp it brings back old memories, especially of Killarney.

“We had only played Tipp there twice, in ’87 and once before that and Tipp won both. It was the makings of us, really.”

Cork’s progress has been mirrored by the Cats: by the time they had dispatched Galway with a near flawless display of hurling, they were back on their familiar perch as All-Ireland favourites, but for Comerford the real turning-point in their season was in the quarter-final replay against Clare.

“The first ten or 15 minutes of the replay against Clare was huge for us. We were trying to combat a seven-man defence, which had never been seen before in hurling. It’s happened in football but not in hurling. We’d learned from the first day when the backs were coming out with the ball and hitting the loose man.

“We learned to make out our own forwards the second day when coming out of defence and Eddie Brennan, Henry and a few more of the forwards were excellent in that 15 minutes.”