Dubs offer a real measure

Allianz FL Division 1 final

Cork people will recognise the truth in the old Irish saying, an rud is measa le duine ar domhan n’fheadair sé nach é lár a leasa é. The very thing a person dreads most in the world could be the best thing for him.

Take, for example, last year’s league semi-final tanking at the hands of Dublin.

While the 17-point swing was interpreted at the time as nothing more than a lesson for a developing team, it was both humbling and humiliating and it captured perfectly what everybody wanted to believe, with the benefit of hindsight of course, about this group of Cork players.

Holding the league semi-final up as evidence, people began to make their own judgments when Cork were subsequently hammered by Kerry in the Munster final.

“Sure they never recovered from that April day in Croke Park” and “they haven’t a stitch of a midfield” were the two most common observations.

The reality was quite a bit different. By the time Cork had played Sligo in the fourth-round qualifier last year, signs of progress and of lessons learnt were there for all to see. Two players were dropping back at either side of the ‘D’.

Players were operating in a state of readiness should they be turned over. The full-back line was never left exposed. Kickouts were being measured so that all those six-foot-plus players of yore wouldn’t be as badly missed as they obviously were.

These are all things Cork have had to do and they have been working harder than any other team in Division 1 this spring.

The period that Cork spent scrambling for an identity during their games against Sligo and Mayo in last year’s championship was never going to be long enough to recover lost ground. It was always going to take a sustained period of examination and of trying out new tricks.

Tomorrow’s game offers them another chance to road test those new elements in their game and to benchmark just how far they have come.

It comes, ironically enough, against the team whose performance against Cork just over a year ago started the talk of invincibility that attached itself to Dublin until the juggernaut eventually came to a halt against Donegal.

Whatever the result tomorrow, we will all be a little bit more circumspect when evaluating teams through the prism of league final and semi-final form.

From the very first game on the first Sunday in February when Cork had two points to spare over the Dubs in Páirc Uí Rinn, both managers have been keen to add context to every performance.

“How much do you read into games like this?” asked Brian Cuthbert on that frosty Sunday afternoon and that appears to have been his mantra every game since.

In his post-match comments that day, Jim Gavin said that he believed Dublin had “played against a very defensive system, the most defensive I’ve ever seen Cork play”.

Gavin could have been talking about virtually every team that has faced his charges since.

In terms of how tomorrow might pan out, all the indicators point to an open entertaining game of football between two über-athletic sets of players. The semi-finals a fortnight ago give us no cause for thinking that things will be any different this time.

Cork’s four-point win against Donegal has to be put in the context of a Donegal team with half an eye on their championship opener against Tyrone (had they won the semi-final, they would have had just under three weeks to prepare for that challenge).

Once Donegal got to the dressing rooms at half-time level with Cork, they had got all they needed out of the game and out of the league campaign. The second half reflected that reality.

It shouldn’t however, take away from the fact that Cork got an awful lot right against one of the better teams in the country.

Fintan Goold, much maligned in some quarters, has been showing in recent times why he’s valued so much by those within the Cork camp. His performance when the game was at its most competitive against Donegal two weeks ago was the latest in a consistent string since the start of the year.

Goold’s possible counterpart tomorrow, Denis Bastick, will appreciate more than most that midfield is a position that takes time to grow into, and perhaps those inside and outside Cork should just appreciate Goold’s recent showings for what they are: a genuinely decent run of form from a mature player.

Alan O’Connor’s recall after tomorrow and Ian Maguire’s return should give more options to Cork in an area where they haven’t really been struggling up to now.

Much of this has been down to what Mark Collins (played sporadically at midfield this season) and Eoin Cadogan (being touted as a more viable alternative) have been doing since early February.

By making themselves available for countless short kickouts, both Collins and Cadogan have allowed Cork to paper over whatever cracks might be there at midfield.

Dublin, who have shown with their job of work on Rory Beggan a fortnight ago, that they can push up and crack the best of them will surely target these handy balls that Cadogan and Collins have been picking up all season.

What happens after that should be interesting. Does Ken O’Halloran go long out the middle, and if so to whom? If he does decide to get medieval with his kickouts, will the O’Driscoll brothers and John O’Rourke be ravenous enough under the breaking ball, more ravenous than, say, James McCarthy, Jack McCaffrey and John Small?

Dublin, too have shown in the latter stages of the league that they are beginning tocope quite well to all the defensive conundrums being put to them. Most recently against Monaghan, the goal chance created for Cian O’Sullivan on 29 minutes and the points scored by Emmet Ó Conghaile and Jack McCaffrey in the 62nd and 66th minutes spoke volumes about Dublin’s more measured approach to breaking down defences.

This is not the hubristic Dublin team that got beaten by Donegal last September, but unless their key players — O’Carroll, McMahon, Macauley, Flynn, Connolly and Brogan — are on the field and tuned in, they can sometimes look quite ordinary.

Dean Rock and Denis Bastick have arguably been the key performers since February 1, but Bastick is unlikely to have the same impact tomorrow and provided the likes of Tom Clancy and some of the retreating Cork forwards keep their discipline in the tackle, Dean Rock’s metronomic precision won’t be a factor.

Further imperatives for Cork? More long diagonal balls, more tackling higher up the field from their blue riband forwards and less shots dropping short into goalkeepers’ hands, which has been a feature for some time.

Finally, they need to avoid the wanton overelaboration evident in one mind-numbing 110-second sequence late in the semi-final, when 26 hand-passes and eight foot-passes ended with no more than a tame wide from Colm O’Neill. Cork will need a lot more conviction in those situations if they’re to become the team they want to be later this year.

Cork and Cuthbert can’t and won’t go back to the demoralising six-month period between August 1, 2014 and February 1, 2015, but tomorrow they have a chance to announce themselves as more than a work in progress, as a team to watch come summer.

The winning and losing of a three in a row is still in Dublin’s hands though.