We need to use Cussen more, says Corrigan

COLMAN CORRIGAN won’t risk looking too far ahead, but he believes Cork footballers are good enough to win the All-Ireland final.

However he accepts it’s conditional on them tidying up their game. In the context of tomorrow’s All-Ireland SFC quarter-final against Sligo in Croke Park (2pm), this relates specifically to getting quality ball at pace into their inside forwards.

Twenty years ago Corrigan missed out on an All-Ireland medal himself. An early injury forced him off at half-time in the final against Meath and seriously undermined the stability of the defence. A year later he was out of luck against the same opposition, this time in a replay.

Nowadays, he’s part of the back-up team, working closely with former players Sean Murphy and Christy Kearney in assisting the management. Their role is to pinpoint problems that may occur, and his task is to monitor activity in the backline.

The general consensus would be that Cork did not do themselves justice against Louth, or to put it another way, the team didn’t perform as impressively as they had in Killarney. Corrigan agrees, up to a point.

“That (view) would be coming from the supporters who probably watched it on television, we were at the game,’’ he responds. “Louth were very much up for it and very focused and they are a very good team. Cork didn’t play well at times. There’s no doubt about that, there was an awful lot of mistakes made. But, at certain times they looked very, very good.’’

When he talks about ‘mistakes’, he’s prepared to accept that a lot of them were fairly basic handling errors — often concentrated around the middle third of the field.

“I think a huge improvement has to be made in the delivery of the ball. I think if we have an Achilles heel, it’s not getting the ball in fast enough into our inside line.

“It happened against Kerry in the first half of the Munster final, when we just didn’t use Michael Cussen enough. If you have somebody inside of his stature and you’re not leaving in the ball, then you’re going to be in trouble.

“We tend to play a lot of the ball around our half-back-midfield- half-forward line instead of getting it in as fast as we possibly can. If we are to win an All-Ireland — and I don’t see any reason why we can’t — we must be right up there with the best of them. We have got to release that ball a little bit faster.’’

Explaining away the performance in Portlaoise, he suspects the Munster final took a lot out of the Cork players, physically and mentally. He bases the judgement on his own experience in the late eighties. “I go back to 1987, when we beat Kerry in the replay, we came along against Galway in the All-Ireland semi-final and we were lucky boys to get out with a draw.

(Larry) Tompkins put the ball over the bar from 50 yards to level the game.

“Sometimes, coming off a Munster final when there’s so much hype and you give it so much effort, there can be a slight kind of lapse. Now they’ve got over that Louth game, it will be all systems go.”

Sligo, he agrees, are certain to present an even greater threat, their status as Connacht champions earning that respect. The reality is that it’s a survival of the fittest, with so much at stake for the remaining teams.

“You have got to be properly focused and you’ve got to play really, really well to come through and get into a semi-final,’’ he adds.

The team’s record in Croke Park in recent years hasn’t been the best (apart from quarter-final wins over Galway and Donegal), but he isn’t unduly worried.

“It’s a very solid-looking team in that I think that in advance of a match the selectors would certainly know their starting 15 and the people that they need to come on. I like the look of it.

“It’s a big ask of the team tomorrow. Cork have got to play really well, but I think if we can get into a semi-final, we can reach the final.’’

He stresses that nobody on their side is taking Sligo for granted, believing that they have got their Connacht final win well out of the system at this stage. And, as symbolic a success it was for the county, he senses that players and management won’t be content with just that. “They have had a couple of weeks to take in what they have achieved. If I was involved in the Sligo team, what you’d be saying to them is ‘look lads, we have achieved something that hasn’t been done for 32 years, but that’s only one step. Why not take it to the second step, we may not get this opportunity again’.”