Losing to Clare a blessing in disguise for Cleary and Cork

BLESSING IN DISGUISE: The seven week break after losing to Clare turned out well for Cork as they were able to organise the team in a manner they couldn't in pre-season. Pic: George Hatchell

Hindsight is a wonderful tool. It’s an equally convenient one too. Selective application can be used to make most narratives fit.

In the case of Cork’s run to the last eight of the football championship, hindsight has shown us the significance of their Easter Sunday Munster quarter-final defeat to Clare and the seven weeks it gave them to disappear from the public eye and sharpen uninterrupted the whole host of areas that has contributed to their displays and results since re-emerging from their Páirc Uí Chaoimh bunker at the end of May.

The first point manager John Cleary wants to make, although it hardly needs making, is that they didn’t want to come off second best to Clare on April 9.

The post-mortem in the days after was not fun. Neither was anxiously waiting around for three weeks to see if they’d be spending the rest of the season on the Sam Maguire motorway or the Tailteann backroads.

But from the remove of victories over Louth, Mayo, and Roscommon, and the manner in which they rattled Kerry, falling so disappointingly to Clare and falling off the championship radar for seven weeks has proven an absolute blessing.

“We wouldn't have thought it at the time and it wasn't something we had planned for,” said Cleary of the unforeseen benefits of failing to protect a four-point second-half lead at Cusack Park.

“We started in the first week of December and we really only had four weeks, and that included Christmas in the middle of it, before you hit the McGrath Cup, and its games thereafter. We didn't have a huge amount of time to work as we thought we needed to work on stuff.

“We went from the McGrath Cup to the League to two weeks later the championship. So after the Clare game was the first time we got a five-week block where number one you weren't worried about pushing fellas harder because there is a game next week or the week after.

“The other thing was we could take our time and work on things, and that's what we did. As we are sitting here now, it definitely has worked to our advantage. But it wasn't something we had planned. It is just the way it turned out.” 

Players were left to their own devices the week after the Clare defeat. Thereafter, Cleary and Kevin Walsh got themselves out into the middle of the field and began directing and shaping.

The work focused almost exclusively on matters tactical. Kickouts, both their own and the opposition’s. Structure. How they’d set up defensively, how they’d counter, and who’d counter.

“If a team hits you on the break, things like that and getting fellas into position. I would think that all of the top teams work on that and have been working on it over a number of years.

“This was our first full year under Kevin Walsh bringing in what he wanted to bring in and the rest of us doing that as well.

“The way the new format has gone with the league and championship, there’s no time to work in-season. I would think that those five weeks have been crucial to what maybe went on over the last few weeks for us.” 

Speaking this weekend last year after their 11-point quarter-final defeat to Dublin, Cleary remarked that Cork were “nowhere near” the game’s standard-bearers.

A year further down the road, where are Cork at now?

“Going to Croke Park again, we’ve definitely improved. We know that ourselves – we’re fitter, we’re stronger, we have probably a more balanced panel, but where that takes us to the top, top teams – and Derry being one of them – this’ll be our test now on Sunday.

“I think we’ve got our game plan going better; we’ve set up better; we’ve managed games better. That’s where we are but that came with time.

“That said, we know that there’s a long way to go yet. We’ve had a taste of playing the Kerrys, the Dublins, the top, top teams and we know that we’re a bit off that yet. We’re hopefully a work in progress and we’ll see that down along the line.”