Denis Ring: Cork must starvegoal-hungry Tipperary

Cork U20 hurling manager Denis Ring says the biggest challenge facing his team in Saturday’s All-Ireland final is to stop Tipperary from scoring four goals.

Liam Cahill’s Premier side have hit 14 goals in their three championship outings, including three on the evening of their dramatic Munster final win over Cork and eight against Wexford in the All-Ireland semi-final earlier this month.

Ring revealed that a former Tipperary hurler — a friend since his college days who he declined to name — told him last weekend “it will take a great team to keep Tipperary within four goals”.

Conor Bowe, Kian O’Kelly, and Jake Morris all found the net against Cork in their Munster final meeting on July 23, with the Premier youngsters missing two other glorious chances early in the second half of that game. Eight Tipperary players have hit the net on their run to the final, five of them bagging at least two goals, with Bowe out in front with three strikes.

“The facts speak for themselves, [Tipperary] have a forward line that’s particularly strong, particularly pacy, particularly athletic, and that rotate almost like a basketball team,” said Ring.

“They are magnificent to watch. Their movement has been exceptional. They mirror, to some degree, the senior forward set-up. We know goals have been very significant for this Tipperary team — 14 in three games, 11 in the last two, against high-ranked teams. It is obvious something has to be done to reduce that tally and that outlet for them. We have been working on ways of doing that. It is going to be difficult.

“A good friend of mine, who won a couple of All-Irelands with Tipp, said to me only on Sunday night that it will take a great team to keep them within four goals, to stop them scoring any more than four goals based on how they are playing and how they have been creating these chances.

That is a target. He was saying it half tongue-in-cheek, but he did mean it and the facts are there to support it. That is the challenge in front of us. And it is one we relish.

The Cork defence kept a clean sheet when overcoming Limerick, Clare, and Kilkenny, but in their sole defeat of the championship, Tipp showed little mercy.

“Liam Sheedy kept using the expression after their Limerick game that ‘you lose or you learn’. From our perspective, we’d like to think we lost the Munster final but we hope we’d have learned an awful lot from it. We conceded three goals that night which is unacceptable at this level. If you concede three goals against Tipperary, you are going to lose.”

As well as having to be cold-blooded in defence in Saturday’s decider, Ring and his backroom team will not be afraid to be ruthless on the line. Being quicker in making necessary personnel changes is a key lesson the management have taken on board from 2018, a season which ended with defeat to Tipperary — a team they walloped in last year’s provincial decider — in the All-Ireland final.

The Cork management introduced only two subs during that 3-13 to 1-16 final loss to Tipp, one of whom was sprung three minutes from the end of the regulation hour.

“There are things we’d look at, in terms of our own decision making, the speed at which we make decisions, could we make them earlier, being more clinical, and so on. We did make some hard calls in the matches this year, maybe more so than we did last year. We’ve made changes going into every game, as well. We’re going on current form rather than, maybe, anticipated form.”

Earlier this summer, Cork great Brian Corcoran attributed an apparent lack of belief in the county’s flagship senior team to the ongoing lack of success at underage level. Cork haven’t won an All-Ireland minor title since 2001, while their U21s last reigned in 1998. Ring believes there “is a certain truth” to Corcoran’s sentiment.

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“I would also say if you are hurling to the last day of the competition regularly and are competing as much as the team’s that winning, there is massive experience being developed in that. From a skill perspective, you are working as hard as all the other teams.

"You must remember this Cork team has won a minor Munster, a lot of them have won an U17 Munster and All-Ireland. Many of them were on the extended panel last year that had that Munster championship as well. Clearly, it is better to win All-Irelands. But the next best thing is to be there contesting them.”

A significant number of players from Ring’s panel were involved in club championship action over the past two weekends, not an ideal scenario when trying to prepare for an All-Ireland final.

“It is the ongoing debate between club and county. Obviously, it’s easier if you have a clear run. You’d much prefer a club run. But club games have to be played too.

"Players are waiting around all year for these games to be played so you can understand both sides of the argument. You have to curtail what you’re trying to do. You’re talking through sessions, rather than actually doing sessions, that’s when you do actually have them in attendance.”