County fixtures causing concern
That factor, more than dissatisfaction with aspects of the team’s performance in Sunday’s Munster final, was occupying manager John Allen yesterday.
And he admitted that it was his ‘biggest source of concern’.
“It’s looking now that we’re going to find it very hard to get our team together.”
His understanding is that the county senior football championship game between St Finbarrs and Nemo Rangers is fixed for the weekend of July 15/16. This would involve Ronan Curran, whose form on Sunday was once more very impressive. Allen fears that if this game is ratified there could be a knock-on effect and other games could be fixed.
“Only a small number of players might be involved, but if games were to go ahead, we wouldn’t be able to have our panel training together.”
Specifically, it would mean that the full squad would not be available to train together until the Tuesday night before the quarter-final. It’s a prospect which haunts the Cork manager.
“It beggars belief, given the historic year it could be for us if we have a chance to make progress,” he said. “If that ‘Barrs fixture does go ahead, it would be viewed as very short-sighted on the part of the board to stymie our training.”
Reflecting on Sunday’s game, Allen agreed that there is plenty of scope for improvement. Revealing that he had been worried in advance about the team’s form, he thought things were ‘a bit flat’ at the start of the game and as a consequence, they hadn’t been able to dictate play.
“That could have been due to Tipp having a good game-plan and sticking with it,” he added. “The previous Sunday, the touch at training was fantastic.
“We were saying it was a pity the game wasn’t that day. But, as the week went on, for some reason we went a bit flat. And our support play wasn’t up to the standard of previous games.”
While he expected Tipperary to be more competitive than they had been in last year’s final (feeling that the second half of that game was a ‘truer’ reflection of the game), Allen conceded that he didn’t anticipate that it would be ‘as tough as it was’.
Donal Óg Cusack’s two stops against Diarmaid Fitzgerald were crucial. “He was very brave on two occasions. His general policing of that area of the field is top-class — if you saw the way he trains, you’d know why he is so good. He is the ultimate professional.
“It was good to see him getting the chance to show how good he is. His influence was huge and he deserves all the credit he got. Those saves were so important because of the game being so finely balanced.”
Equally, he acknowledged the major contribution of corner-back Brian Murphy, saying that he was a proven man-marker and that it had been a great achievement to limit Eoin Kelly to a point from play.
In more general terms, Allen explained that the strategy was to try and prevent the amount of ball going into the Tipp sharpshooter. “We said that if our half-forward line and our midfielders were able to slow down the supply or cut it out, that was where we’d be starting our defence from.
“If Eoin Kelly was playing in either corner, Brian was going to be on him. Other than that we weren’t going to upset our full-back line — unless we really had to. It was a pleasure to see the way Brian played, I don’t think he fouled at all.”
Allen accepted that his team made it more difficult for themselves by wasting a lot of what he described as scoreable chances in the second half.
“Up to the last five minutes the game was in the balance. We got two frees in the half-back line which were vital and Joe Deane was so accurate over the course of the whole game.”
A further source of concern was that no score came from the half-forward line over the 70 minutes. At the same time he wasn’t prepared to be too critical of them, commenting: “The forwards are there as a unit to get more scores. Who does the scoring really doesn’t matter.
“It just happened that your full-forward line got 2-10 and while our half-forwards didn’t score, they worked very hard and they were at all times giving the option by their running off the ball.”
Putting aside his worry about the possible fixtures crux at local level, Allen says he is pleased about one thing — that the champions won’t be going into the quarter-final as ‘overwhelming favourites’.
“That’s a positive,” he says.
“The mantle of being unbeatable is probably gone for us now — which is a good thing.”
