How the mighty have fallen (and are working their way back)
Cast your mind back a couple of years to June 2016 and a result that —– at the time — appeared to signify the moment Cork footballers reached the bottom.
Tipperary had just beaten their neighbours for the first time in 72 years of Championship football.
Alongside the outpouring of goodwill to Tipp came a side-serving of pity and wonderment that Cork were managing to make a total balls-up of things.
The year after, Cork just managed to pip Tipp by a point in the Championship.
Whatever gap was there was closing and although in the Division Two league opener last year Tipp won by two goals, Cork took it out on them in the Munster semi-final.
Though given what happened in the final, many Cork folk might have wished they never got there.
Cork survived last year’s drop to Division with superior scoring difference than Down. Both had 6 points on the board — a figure that would comfortably have kept you afloat in other years.
With one point on the board after four games now and Tipperary also in the relegation zone, there is a sense that their meeting this evening in Semple Stadium could be the actual moment when Cork football realised it had another few more doors to walk into and stairs to fall down before it’s moment of clarity.
How bad would that be? Not as bad as they might imagine.
Their fellow All-Ireland finalists from 2010, Down, have spent a fair bit of time getting used to the third tier of football. In 2008 after the National League reshuffle, they found themselves spat into Division Three.
That year, Fermanagh and Wexford were promoted but from the start of 2009 Down won two successive promotions and played in an All-Ireland final within the space of 22 months.
During James McCartan’s time they stayed competitive in the top flight, making successive league play-offs but after Jim McCorry’s spell in charge came to a desperate end – the county executive recommending he be removed from the post only for the clubs voting to retain him, only for McCorry to sensationally resign – they had three years of wandering in the wilderness.
“I won’t say ‘the fall out’ but the bad press and the chat about it was bad,” says Mark Poland, who played in that 2010 All-Ireland final.
There was an ill-feeling around the whole thing and as a player, you were hearing stories that nobody wanted the Down job.
“That it was more or less the last choice as such…”
Who he refers to was Eamonn Burns. He took charge in 2016 and they failed to win a game all year, falling to Monaghan in the summer to their record Championship defeat.
Proclamations that ‘We got our man’ by the county secretary Sean Óg McAteer were met with bemusement from football people in Down.
The process was shambolic. Burns never gave the impression he was anything but hugely reluctant to take the role.
Which is all the more surprising that they reached the Ulster final in 2017. Hopes of building on that fell flat when they dropped back into the third tier in March last year before a limp Championship campaign.
For Poland, the mistake was not in appointing current manager Paddy Tally instead of Burns at the tail end of 2015.
“There was a lot of talk of him coming in as coach and I don’t think Paddy wanted that, he wanted the number one job back then,” states Poland.
Tally comes with some reputational harm, being blamed for Galway’s changed footballing philosophy, but having shown he can produce miracles with the St Mary’s Sigerson Cup triumph in 2017.
“Just from hearing the lads and speaking to them, how professionally it is run, I wish it had been made back then. You can’t do anything about that now, unfortunately,” he adds.
I would be quite envious of the boys now watching the matches. It might not be pretty to watch, but Paddy spoke to me when I met him at a club Championship match and he was just saying last year and the year before they conceded big scores and they had to start somewhere.
“He has a plan and you can see the boys know what they are doing when they go out onto the pitch.”
As recently as 2014, Derry enjoyed the type of league campaign that gives a team hope of becoming All-Ireland contenders, beating Dublin at home on an evening Celtic Park was bubbling with humidity.
Since then they went into tailspin. Relegated in 2015, scoring difference rescued them from a second successive drop in 2016.
In 2017 and 2018 they dropped like a stone until they found themselves facing off against Wicklow, London and Waterford.
Their situation is rather more nuanced, though Damian Barton’s two years in charge were characterised by the absences from the squad.
Ten of last weekend’s starters against Wicklow were from Slaughtneil, or the Glen club in Maghera, who dominated the underage scene for five years, around five years ago.
If you take the McKaigue brothers Karl and Chrissy, Paul McNeill and Brendan Rogers out of the Derry defence, that’s four out of six certain starters. With Slaughtneil going so well over the past number of years, they have played virtually no league football. Add in the impact Padraig Cassidy and Christopher Bradley could have made further up the pitch and you can see how Barton’s hands were tied.
The introduction of Ciaran Meenagh as coach this year has been a success. Now, Derry are in the top three of tightest defences, albeit their record is earned in Division Four, while for the three years before that their league record had them in the worst three defences in all divisions.
They are well set for the future too.
“The standard of underage football in Derry is unreal,” says Adrian McGuckin, the former schoolteacher who made St Pat’s Maghera the football nursery that formed the backbone of the 1993 All-Ireland winning team.
I was coaching a team last year in Ballinderry in an under 14 B competition. There were eight teams in it and you couldn’t have kicked a ball between any of them. Now I would like to think that in a few years’ time, you could pick a minor team out of that B section that would compete against any other county in Ulster.
“You move up to the eight teams that were above us, the Lavey’s, Bellaghy’s, Magherafelt’s and Dungiven’s, they were totally on a different level altogether.
“St Pat’s Maghera, the quality they had this year was incredible. I went to the quarter-final against Dungannon and was looking through the programme. There were boys at number 34 and I was saying, ‘God, if I had those boys about whenever I was at Maghera I would have been building my team around them!’”
Having won two of the last four minor titles and current under-20 champions, they are well placed to shoot back up the tables.
Without a Munster minor Championship appearance since 2014, an U21 title since 2016, Cork have no such comforts.
The county footballers also have the misfortune to be listing just as a wave of negative press surrounds the county board and their handling of the Páirc Uí Chaoimh fiasco, while the football strategy document is being scoffed to death because of the inclusion of the word ‘Corkness.’
And now, Tipperary are the ones holding the axe over their neck. In Semple of all places.
If it all goes badly wrong, there will be few there to mourn, weep and pity.
How did it come to this?
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