Cork fail to break down Derry's well oiled machine

The expectation was that Cork would ask questions of the Derry machine but ultimately fail to break it down. So it proved

Mon, 03 Jul, 2023 - 07:05

Brendan O'Brien, Croke Park

All-Ireland SFC semi-final

Derry 1-12 Cork 1-8

Knowing what’s coming? That’s one thing. Doing enough to counter it, that’s another. The expectation was that Cork would ask questions of the Derry machine but ultimately fail to break it down. So it proved. Four points felt just about right as the end margin.

Cork manager John Cleary tagged it as a “strange sort of game” but it was an All-Ireland quarter-final that was all too typical of modern football with entertainment and scores at a premium and a sizeable Croke Park crowd reduced to near silence through much of it.

In that sense, it wasn’t far removed from the Armagh-Monaghan tie at HQ the day before, the plus being that the crowd wasn’t subjected to an extra twenty-something minutes, the minus maybe that there was no ultimate payoff in the form of a penalty shootout.

It was all a far cry from days of old, some of them highlighted on the big screen beforehand with a tribute to the recently departed Teddy McCarthy as the great man slalomed through on goals, kicking points to the wild glee of a packed Hill 16 draped in red and white.

That’s the misty-eyed, ‘things were much better in my day’ side of things. The only hard currency in the inter-county game comes in the shape of results and Derry looked exactly like a team that is that much further down the development road than Cork.

Ciaran Meenagh may have been elevated to the role of boss man less than two weeks ago but he has been plugged into what was for so long Rory Gallagher’s project for three or four years. This is Kevin Walsh’s first campaign on the Cork brains trust. All this showed.

Think for a second about how Cork weren’t offered a single free in scoring range across the entire affair and the systematic and clinical nature of what the Ulster county is doing becomes apparent. Steven Sherlock did score from two dead balls but both were ‘45’s.

That takes a discipline and a patience of serious proportions across 70 minutes and the winners were more than happy with how key matchups – Brendan Rogers on Ian Maguire, Paul Cassidy on Matty Taylor among them – fell on the day.

Coaching has elevated team sports to levels of excellence previously unimagined but the flip side has been the intolerance for mistakes and individuality and even a team with Derry’s scattering of top talent adheres to this collective framework.

That’s just how it is.

Cleary’s reflections focused, in the main, on the manner in which Cork fell short in front of goal. As explained elsewhere in these pages, they finished with a conversion rate of just 41% that was never going to earn them another day in Dublin.

They started off with three full and interrupted minutes of possession that ended with a skewed Sherlock wide and there were just too many occasions when they engineered half an opening through, around or over the red sea that ultimately came to naught.

Another Cleary point was well made in that Cork really needed to get their noses in front if they were to flush Derry from their defensive burrow. They did manage the game's first score through Colm O’Callaghan but the Ulster champions were in front soon enough.

Add in their heightened threat in attack this year and it made for an ominous afternoon.

Derry led from the 13th minute to the final whistle and all Cork could do was to get within touching distance without ever actually catching up. They scored three on the bounce to sit one behind at the break but then failed to push on.

More missed chances at the start of the second-half were compounded by three Derry points and the pity from Cork’s and the neutral’s perspective was that Rory Maguire’s 47th-minute goal was cancelled out by Conor Doherty’s just 30 seconds later.

The remaining 20-plus minutes were played out on Derry’s rigid terms after that brief interlude of excitement and it took a Micheal Martin injury-time penalty save from Shane McGuigan to prevent the scoreboard from painting an unfair version of events.

Derry’s style is so contained and tight that it’s hard to tell if they have another gear in them or not, but Cleary was of the belief that his side certainly did, the Cork manager suggesting there was a flatness to their play after the heavy workload in recent weeks.

It bears remembering that Monaghan had a similarly testing journey to Croke Park this weekend and managed to stay with Armagh for a game that stretched deep into extra-time but then Derry are a team that has long since learned to get over the line.

Cork still have some of those same modules to sit.

Scorers for Derry: S McGuigan (0-4 frees); C Doherty (1-0); B Rogers, E Doherty, P Cassidy (all 0-2); C McFaul and N Loughlin (both 0-1).

Scorers for Cork: R Maguire (1-0); C O’Callaghan (0-2); S Sherlock (0-2 ‘45’s); K O’Donovan, R Deane, C Og Jones and E McSweeney (all 0-1).

Derry: O Lynch; C McKaigue, E McEvoy, C McCluskey; C Doherty, G McKinless, P McGrogan; C Glass, B Rogers; N Toner, P Cassidy, E Doherty; C McFaul, S McGuigan, N Loughlin.

Subs: E McSweeney for O’Hanlon (40); C Og Jones for Powter (51); B Hurley for Sherlock (56); J O’Rourke for O’Driscoll (59); P Walsh for Deane (67).

Cork: M Martin; M Shanley, R Maguire, T Walsh; K O’Donovan, D O’Mahony, M Taylor; C O’Callaghan, I Maguire; B O’Driscoll, R Deane, K O’Hanlon; S Powter, S Sherlock, C Corbett.

Subs: B Heron for Toner (46); L Murray for Loughlin (56); P Cassidy for McFaul (59); S Downey for McEvoy (66); P McNeil for Doherty (73).

Referee: J McQuillan (Cavan).