Cork’s kick-out strategy made no sense at all

MAYBE it was a double bluff by Kerry. After all they invented all that stuff.

But you have to wonder with so much talk about Kerry’s midfield deficiencies before yesterday’s Munster final, did Cork get sucked into a counter-tactic of ignoring their own midfield strengths?

Why else would Cork devise a kick-out strategy which put the ball within reach of the most dangerous set of forwards playing inter-county football. Surely if you have a dominant midfield and you want to limit the involvement of the opposition attack, the last thing you do is ignore the former and involve the latter?

This could not have been something that Alan Quirke called on the day. It was too consistent for that. Perhaps Cork believed Kerry would turn centre-field into a traffic jam and figured they would bypass it with short kick-outs and long balls into the Cork forwards?

Indeed, that looked like the strategy in the early minutes of yesterday’s Munster final, when Donncha O’Connor was prospering off Marc Ó Sé and Tom O’Sullivan was suitably unnerved to punch a long ball straight to the in-rushing Paul Kerrigan (who should have goaled).

Instead though, it was the Cork defence in panic stations, and their own tactics were the cause of same. What it meant was that any turnover was going to be immediately pushed to the fullest extent by the likes of Declan O’Sullivan, Kieran Donaghy and Darran O’Sullivan. Heaven help us if Gooch was at his sharpest.

The irony is that when Kerry went long with their kickouts, Cork’s midfield were able to prove they had a potential, and crucial, upper hand. They won five of Kerry’s seven first-half kickouts and while Cork secured possession from 14 of their own 19 kickouts in the first period, the statistic is misleading because that’s only primary possession — they turned three of those over to Kerry under pressure.

Of course none of this does terminal damage to the All-Ireland champions’ hope of retaining their title but doubtless Cork could have left Killarney with a psychological hammer-blow inflicted on one of their biggest rivals for the Championship.

I fancied Cork with good reason beforehand but there was a worrying lack of nous to some of their play. For instance, there had to be a better plan to get Ciarán Sheehan into the game in the first-half, when he looked to have the beating of Aidan O’Mahony. If that was Kerry, they would find their target man early and often. Cork are the All-Ireland champions and they should now be dictating the tactics from a position of strength and superiority, yet for too long yesterday, Kerry’s attacking strategy looked more productive than Cork’s.

Now to their credit, Cork deserve credit for the way they battled back after half-time, when the changes in defence (bringing in Eoin Cadogan and Eoin Cotter) gave them a more solid platform to get at Kerry. Alan O’Connor, Pearse O’Neill and Graham Canty did this with great gusto and it was more the pity that O’Connor didn’t take his equalising point instead of handing off to John Miskella for that late effort which came off the Kerry upright. Had Cork drawn level from a deficit of nine points, they would probably have gone on to win the final.

However, it showed Kerry are vulnerable. They are struggling for legs and while their high-intensity tackling and smothering was impressive in the first-half, it came at a cost as they ran out of legs. Taking off Kieran O’Leary was strange, all the more so because his replacement Barry John Keane lost two important possessions when he came on. In the absence of Tomás Ó Sé and Paul Galvin, Kerry’s bench has a pretty threadbare look about it.

Their second-half display was flat as they ran out of steam. Even the unbelievable Declan O’Sullivan, who adopted the Paul Galvin workhorse role for the day, ran out of puff. That’s a balance Jack O’Connor will have to work on between now and the quarter-final in Croke Park.

In the meantime, Conor Counihan will be hoping for good news on Ciarán Sheehan but fearing the worst, hoping he doesn’t lose any other starters and praying that the qualifier draw doesn’t throw him a curveball.