Sound of silence from Cork management

Brian Cuthbert’s body language as he exited the Kildare dressing-room after delivering his congratulatory speech late on Saturday wasn’t suggestive of a man who was keen to shoot the breeze, but the question had to be asked.

Any chance of a word, Brian?

“No thanks. No.” And on he walked.

Queries made by print, TV and radio reporters to county board officers were met with shrugs, shakes of the head and confirmation from one that no-one would be put forward for media duties in the wake of the defeat.

An understandable human reaction, perhaps, but not the correct one. Any PR undergraduate will tell you that if there is bad news to be filed about you then you may as well get out in front of it and seek to shape the fallout in some small way.

It may be that Cuthbert felt no need. His two-year term in charge of the Cork senior footballers came to a close in Thurles and it could be that he felt he could spare himself one last searing examination in front of the press.

By late Saturday evening and yesterday morning, there were already a number of articles posted online seeking to explain not just what has gone wrong with Cork football, but where it must turn and what it must do in order to arrest the decline. The common consensus was that the Cuthbert era was over.

See? That’s the consequence of a news vacuum: speculation takes the place of quotes and hard facts. Pat Gilroy learned that from Paul Caffrey, his predecessor as Dublin manager, and disarmed the damaging opinion pieces with player access and soft interview pieces.

“It has to be taken into account Cork’s situation,” said Kildare manager Jason Ryan as he dissected the entrails of this evisceration. “They played a few days ago. It is really tough and the conditions were horrendous [in Killarney].

“Physically and mentally that would have taken a huge amount out of them. That wasn’t the Cork team that we would have seen blow Donegal out of the water or put in some of those fantastic performances that they did in the National League.”

Cork actually lost to Donegal in the league, of course, but they did blow Kerry out of the water and should have delivered another defeat to their rivals earlier this month.

It seems scarcely believable that only three weeks have elapsed since Fionn Fitzgerald’s late point rescued a draw for the Kingdom in Killarney in the drawn Munster final, and Cuthbert spoke about his side’s “tremendous heart and spirit”.

Their best fell shockingly short of the required levels against Kildare. It was Rob Andrew, the former England fly-half, who pointed out that there is no such thing as lack of confidence. “You either have it or you don’t,” he said. Cork had no confidence.

The tactics adopted did little to help them. Thirteen men behind the ball against a side quite recently relegated to the third tier of the league sent out the wrong signal, but Cork compounded that with their sloppy play.

The result was a fourth heavy beating in two years. A first eviction before the All-Ireland quarter-final stage since 2004. And against a side that will play the likes of Clare and Sligo when the Allianz League resumes.

Where, indeed, do Cork go from here?