Eventually, Cork will crack the code

“Davy isn’t going to rethink his grand plan, of course. He’s invested too much time, thought and faith in it. So, even though the current margin for error is too wide, Clare readers tempted to howl in anguish when passes go astray tomorrow shouldn’t bother.

“There will be no doctrinal shift. What’s required now is time and flexibility. Time to allow the players to grow with the system and fully come to terms with it. Flexibility on the part of the manager to allow them tweak it as they go.”

Me, here, June 22 2013

Well, that worked rather better for them than might have been anticipated. Rather quicker, too. The occasional message on a sliotar is still going astray — witness a Pat Donnellan blooper against Limerick last month that we’ll return to anon — but the players have grown with the system and the manager seems to have taken a deep breath also.

The upshot is that the Banner express pulls in to Croke Park tomorrow two or three years ahead of estimated arrival time. Whatever one’s opinion of Davy — and Lord knows he doesn’t make it easy on himself sometimes — the man is due any amount of praise for that.

Clare have a system and they have the players. Some teams have a system; others have very good players; Clare possess both. The happy medium is sourced in the fact that Davy hasn’t gone all like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (“Sentence first — verdict afterwards!”) and put the cart before the horse.

Consider last month’s All Ireland semi-final. Donnellan, the Clare centre-back, hit their opening point from the Limerick 20m line. Patrick O’Connor, their left half-back, hit the next point from the Limerick 50m line. And in the second half David McInerney charged up the field and attempted to shoot from the same distance. McInerney, for readers who are unaware, is the Clare full-back.

To put it another way, Davy hasn’t so much redrawn the grid as torn it up and replaced it with one of his own, manufactured after a design process of many years.

It’s a variant of Total Hurling in the sense of that phrase meaning every player willing to defend and every player willing to attack. The seventh Clare defender gives the rest of them freedom. Freedom to attack the ball, freedom to be expansive — and to hell with the consequences because they won’t be caught short and they know it.

The more Clare have hurled this year, the less they’ve looked confined by a straitjacket. Practice has, if not made perfect, at least planed some jagged edges, primarily their shot selection and accuracy: from 12 wides in the second half against Kilkenny in March, and 24 wides in 90 minutes against Cork in the relegation play-off in April, to nine wides against Galway in July and five against Limerick last month.

Everything the players do screams faith. Donnellan made a mistake against Waterford in the provincial quarter-final, primping a short ball that led to Jake Dillon’s goal when he could have gone long with it. We declaimed portentously here afterwards that Donnellan would never in his life commit the same error again.

Guess what? We were wrong. Badly. Donnellan hit a clearance against Limerick that Paul Browne latched onto and redirected over the bar. But Donnellan will happily put himself in the position to make the same mistake again tomorrow. They all will. Because they believe in the game plan.

Domhnall O’Donovan and McInerney play with an abandon rarely witnessed from inhabitants of a full-back line. The nominal centre-forward Tony Kelly, if a little too fond of his ball tricks, is as frequently seen defending on his own endline as he is popping up in the opposition half. Colm Galvin, the man who stitches it together in the middle of the field, has more than a touch of the Cha Fitzpatrick about him; higher praise from this parish you will not get. And tomorrow may be the day Darach Honan displaces the kind of water his height and frame demand he should be displacing every day.

Cracking this group of Clare players could entail a long march. That’s not to be confused with beating Clare, which will happen again and again over the coming seasons. But cracking Clare won’t be over and done with tomorrow.

All of the above said, this is not a juncture for the manager to try and be too clever or for believing his own press cuttings.

As was pointed out here at the time, Davy was wildly over-praised for his tactical acumen in the immediate aftermath of the semi-final. Yet despite the missed frees, despite the sloppy goal they shipped, Limerick were still within hailing distance entering the closing stages. It is a caveat that is not easily dismissed.

And so this unexpected delight of a hurling summer ends with one more plum to be pulled out by one more thumb. It was a championship that might have been scripted by Forrest Gump’s mama. The championship is like a box of chocolates, you dunno what you’re gonna get.

Dublin and Limerick rewrote their respective modern histories by winning provincial silverware. Waterford punched their weight and a bit above it. Kilkenny were vastly more interesting as a fallible, mediocre team raging against light’s death than as a remorselessly successful one. Wexford and Laois made progress within their own registers. Offaly gave a creditable account of themselves against the All-Ireland champions. The Antrim U21s leaped a chasm. Only Galway and Tipperary had reason to call in Stalin’s airbrushers and excise 2013 from historiography.

That’s why a championship that started with more explosions than Mr Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party and continued with a string of further detonations really needs a good send-off.

Oh. Cork. They’re here too. Almost forgot...

Thing is, there was no inevitability they would be. Not after the loss of Sweetnam, Cadogan, O’Sullivan and Murphy. Like Clare, though, they bear testimony to the efficacy of strong management. Cork have known their best 15, or near enough to it, from early in the year. They’ve stuck with it. They’ve allowed the forwards to make mistakes and have nearly-good matches. And they did not blanch at making a hard decision at right half-back tomorrow.

Up front they’re neat and tidy and easy on the eye and if they’re a little lightweight they nonetheless have four forwards who are a bright opening quarter away from a potential man of the match display. Nor are they too ambitious, which means they’re not wasteful.

They also have Jimmy Barry-Murphy. The classiest man in the entire history of the GAA, and all the classier because it comes so naturally. Not that one ever expects a Cork team, in whatever arena, to be labouring under an inferiority complex, but beating Kilkenny provided a turbo boost that may have surprised even themselves. Against the All-Ireland champions they were cautious. Against Dublin they went for it from the off.

Admittedly Dublin made it easier than it might have been in the first half by keeping their midfielders too far up the field, a mistake that was rectified at half-time. Davy, for whom enough protection is still insufficient — in another life he would sell double-glazing for a living — has his half-back line guarded in front by a three-man early-warning system, this season’s must-have accessory, and from behind by Pat Donnellan.

For Cork, the issue is logistical: they have to get the ball either beyond him or held up short of him, and mould their moves from there.

Gavin O’Mahony showed them one option three weeks ago when, in cricketing terms, he split the field with a powerful cover drive that led to Graeme Mulcahy’s early goal chance for Limerick. Pragmatism as well as heritage demands Cork pull on a few ground balls tomorrow. Elsewhere they’re unlikely to push a spare defender too far ahead of the full-back line.

It’ll be a day of light cavalry rather than the heavy armoured vehicles of those shuddering, juddering Kilkenny-Tipperary clashes. Yet the formbook leaves little room for doubt that it should be Cork. “I’ll see your wins against Galway, who were rancid, and Limerick, who were worse, and raise you wins against the All-Ireland champions and the Leinster champions.

“No comparison, boy.”

They’ll probably get there in the end, regardless of how long it takes them to crack the code. Because Cork are Cork. Because Jimmy is Jimmy.

And Clare? A battle lost. But the war will still be theirs to win, the earth still theirs to inherit, over the next five years.

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