Enda McEvoy: 'Inasmuch as any league final has to be won, Waterford need to be winning this one'

Encouraging as it would be for Waterford to win, it would be even more encouraging for them to do so minus the services of Austin Gleeson.

Cork's Darragh Fitzgibbon under pressure from Calum Lyons of Waterford during last year's Allianz Hurling League Division 1 Group A game between the counties at Páirc Ui Chaoimh 

The great unscripted drama, as John Allen once put it so poetically and so accurately. The referee throws in the ball, away they go and in a sport as random as hurling – a game as random as hurling used to be, at any rate - anything can happen and frequently does.

Except at Páirc Uí Chaoimh seven nights ago, when Cork won in precisely the manner that, if they were to win, the world and its mother knew they would.

It was an eminently pleasing victory without representing a great leap forward; it was too much a photocopy of the All-Ireland semi-final for that. Kilkenny remain the equivalent of a souped-up light heavyweight blessed with ample guts but burdened with leaden footwork and telegraphed punches. The kind of opponent whose hands do not sing and who wears himself out before the final round or two.

Enumerated at length in the immediate aftermath, Cork’s list of reasons to be cheerful bears repeating. Their ability to change gear. Their second-half dominance. The nine-point turnaround. Crossing the finishing line without Patrick Horgan and Shane Kingston on the field.

If one wanted to carp one might wonder why it took the hosts, having looked probable winners ten minutes into the second half, so long to put their opponents away. But this is the stage they’re at in their development under Kingston  pére and yes, that would be carping. Kilkenny’s doughtiness rendered it a far more meaningful contest for Cork, and therefore a far more satisfactory preparation for the final, than Wexford’s lack of doughtiness did for Waterford.

Can a team possess too many classy players? Probably yes. The emergence of Ciarán Joyce and the return of Conor Lehane furnish the Rebels with even more pacy stickmen. Grand, but it’s for this very reason they’ll require Seamus Harnedy in the whole of his health over the coming months. Someone who’ll make the hard yards rather than the easy yards and who’ll keep them in games until the motorcycle riders are sent on to close it out.

By dismantling Kilkenny’s puckout game the Cork half-back line established a platform on which their colleagues could pour forward like the Bard’s waves making towards the pebbled shore. Go shorter with puckouts, overfly the half-backs, make them turn and no such platform is constructed. Besides, Waterford’s midfield and outer line of attack might have been assembled to compete in the 400m. Brian Cody did not possess athletes; Liam Cahill does.

It took him and his management team barely a second glance at the video to acknowledge that Austin Gleeson was bang to rights and that no appeal would overturn the red card. Pragmatism reigned; proper order. Disciplinary appeals invariably take on an irritating half-life of their own. Counties like Waterford do not need sideshows in the week of national finals.

Gleeson’s loss is unquantifiable in the true meaning of the word. What would he have got up to tomorrow night?

Hurled brilliantly, as he did last Sunday when he hit not one but two of those goals – homing in from the left and roofing it – he seems to have been scoring over and over again since he announced himself against Cork in 2014? Fared so poorly as to be taken off, as he has been on big days in the past? Performed somewhere in between, possibly landing a couple of nice points without bestriding proceedings and bending them to his will?

We don’t know. Cahill doesn’t know either. There will no chef’s secret sauce accompanying the dish his waiters serve up here.

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Encouraging as it would be for Waterford to win, it would be even more encouraging for them to do so minus the services of Gleeson.

What’s perhaps not a good thing for everyone concerned is that the Mount Sion man, for whom the penny should of course have dropped at this hour of his life, is his team’s difference maker. He could win them an All Ireland. He could cost them an All Ireland. It is a fine line and an undesirable one.

Waterford’s ruthlessness at Nowlan Park was encouraging, Wexford’s no-show notwithstanding. An opening goal after four minutes; three more goals; and a concluding green flag after 62 minutes when, the contest long since expired as a going concern, Shane Bennett had the opportunity for a handy point and eschewed it.

Not a biggie in the greater scheme but you know what Sherlock Holmes said about the importance of the little things. Cahill will have been pleased. All successful teams have something of the vampire about them. They sense vulnerability and exercise their taste for blood.

By a similar token Mikey Kiely could have popped over a point in the first half. Instead Kiely, the terror of the Dungarvan moshpits, chose to barge into Diarmuid O’Keeffe, bowl him over, then take his point. It was amusingly and entirely gratuitous and Cahill will have been absolutely delighted. Every team needs its platoon with this kind of lust for battle.

Some other observations.

Midway through the second half at Páirc Uí Chaoimh last Saturday a thought occurred. Imagine Marty McFlying two of the 1992 league semi-finalists 30 years forward and showing them this. The runs, the offloads, the length of many of the deliveries, the purposefulness behind most of them, the communal fixation with stripping the play of randomness to the furthest possible degree, above all the whirlwind pace.

Would the lads of ‘92 recognise it as the same sport? Would they want to play it or would they be terrified by it?

Many league finals mean little in the long run, or at least they did until Nicky English discovered the joys of the competition in 2001 and started a trend. But Saturday’s protagonists met in the 1998 showpiece and it portended much, all of it auspicious, for both.

Cork, with a loudly heralded bunch of youngsters, some of them on the field and others including Dónal Óg Cusack on the bench, won and would be All Ireland champions within 16 months. Waterford, with a slightly less heralded bunch of youngsters (Ken McGrath, Dave Bennett, the big man from Lismore), lost but have been knocking around ever since. The 1998 league final, indeed, was where modern Waterford hurling began.

In an age where every second player is built like a tank Darragh Fitzgibbon, who is not built like a tank, offers a pleasing reminder that pace only goes so far when not backed up by poise, balance, quick wrists and the ability to ghost through tight spaces as opposed to bullock through them.

There is an extremely common, extremely inelegant phrase for the situation in which the Déise find themselves. The one about a certain item of bathroom furniture and a certain bodily process that’s enhanced by a healthy supply of roughage in one’s diet.

Inasmuch as any league final has to be won, Waterford need to be winning this one. Reports of a prevailing general pre-championship giddiness around the county, an apparent belief that an All Ireland semi-final berth will be the very least of it, are disquieting.

A more immediate and practical caveat is that they were, if anything, too sharp and focused last Sunday. Zoned in, bouncing on the balls of their feet, picking off Wexford puckouts from the start. If one of the finalists train on by a few lengths from last weekend it’ll be Cork.

The latter can hurl well – very well – in one register. Waterford, further down the road under Cahill as well they ought to be, can hurl in more than one register, may boast more in the way of iron-minded defenders and don’t require a shootout to win.

In a year’s time, or even four months’ time, it may be different. But this weekend it’s Waterford.