It is sobering to think that it is only five years since the outcome of an All-Ireland final between these teams was decided by a wonderfully intuitive player such as Seanie McGrath, who didn’t play the percentages, wasn’t inclined to put two hands on the hurley, wasn’t wild about tackling or mad about the dropping ball. Look around last Sunday’s battlefield and try to imagine where Seanie would have fitted in.
Evolution never stops and it involves a transaction: giving and taking.
For generations there was a place for randomness at hurling’s essence.
That moment where the ball was met and moved in the same instant; where the skill was timing, the synchronism of wrist and eye. For half a century, though, that randomness has been under attack. The Wexford team of the 1950s popularised catching and the great Tipperary centre-back Tony Wall perfected the art of batting and before long overhead hurling was in terminal decline.
Ground hurling? Eleven years ago a profile of Tomas Mulcahy prompted a call to Donal O’Grady, his former teacher and coach in North Monastery.
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O’Grady remarked to us what a great ground hurler Mulcahy had been at colleges’ level and said, with some regret, how inter-county hurling had taken that out of his game.
Then O’Grady got his hands on an inter-county team and he knew that ground hurling or any of its derivatives weren’t the future. As a swing thought, “Let Fly” had disappeared from every winning philosophy. The hurling we know now, the game that was showcased in Croke Park last Sunday by the leading practitioners of the modern game, is about curbing randomness or, as the sports psychologists say, controlling the controllables.
The level of ball management Cork attempted was the most extraordinary thing about their performance. On all good teams for many years half- backs have been under pressure to deliver measured balls to their forward lines but last Sunday it was obvious how much pressure Cork have put on their full-back line to follow suit.
Diarmuid O’Sullivan came out with the ball a few times and found himself in situations where, in other years, he would have been reaching for his Big Bertha and trying to drive the green; last Sunday his only thought was playing for position. A hand pass, a flick, a sympathetically flighted delivery. Wayne Sherlock picked up a ball in space in the first half with the opportunity to drive it 80 yards and instead tried to arrow a 40-yard pass down the sideline. In Gaelic football it is common practice to work the ball in short passes as far as centre field before even considering a long kicked pass; last Sunday the Cork defenders applied a little of that outlook, constantly seeking to move the ball to another Cork player in space rather than just belting it.
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In fairness to Brian Cody and this Kilkenny team they have forced all their serious challengers to regard the ball as precious. Kilkenny have the ball players to punish teams and the ball winners to strangle them, so if you’re careless with the ball they’re going to hurt you. Galway were the only team this summer to take on Kilkenny in a completely orthodox fashion with no discernible plan for ball management and they were blown away.
To win last Sunday Cork knew they had to reduce the number of 50-50 contests for the ball from centre field up. Crucial to that were Donal Óg Cusack’s puck-outs. Over the past two seasons it has been a constant issue for Cork and for every big game they’ve had to devise a new variation. Kilkenny weren’t buying any of the old tricks, however, and when Cusack urged his corner- backs to spread out as potential receivers Kilkenny’s forwards weren’t conned. Their only concern was to follow orders and occupy the main corridors of space in Cusack’s eye line.
For various reasons Cork won only three of their 12 puck-outs in the first half and all of RTE’s analysts were urging Cusack to just hit the ball as far as he could. But, patently, that wasn’t the percentage play either. When he went long in the first half the Kilkenny half- back line won every ball. When he went long for the first 20 minutes in Killarney the ball bounced back off a glass wall.
According to Cork’s internal statistics the half-forward line won just two puck-outs against Limerick and the tide clearly turned against Cork in the second half of the Munster final when they started landing high ball on the Waterford half- backs. How quickly people forget. Rewind the clock to the 1983 All-Ireland final when Cork pumped the ball as long as they could with the wind in the second half against Kilkenny and were eaten up by Frank Cummins and Ger Henderson.
The only change in Cusack’s puck-outs in the second half was that he didn’t put the ball at risk inside his own 65. Otherwise he was still flying the ball as low as was feasible and he was still trying to place a Cork player in space. The big difference was that his potential targets made themselves more available. Driving the ball long would have amounted to panic. Without calmness you can’t have control. Without control Cork couldn’t have won.
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So, where does hurling go from here? This Kilkenny team brought the game to a new place. The Clare team of the 1990s played with Kilkenny’s aggression and both teams shared a strain of strategic cynicism when their goal was under threat but Kilkenny married those qualities to a high level of virtuosity. They trained at the tone and tempo they expected to play at, which is exactly what Clare did, too. But as Clare discovered in Ger Loughnane’s final years there is a finite life to such an approach.
In his Kilkenny People column on Friday John Power argued that the intensity of Cody’s training in the past month robbed the team of any freshness and killed their chances. There is no closeness between Power and Cody but it is a point worthy of discussion nonetheless. An interested observer dropped in recently and witnessed a session that included three 15-minute matches of ferocious hurling where only one free was awarded by Cody. Grinding stuff.
At Cork sessions the emphasis is on repetition of drills rather than full-contact matches. Maybe that will be the new rock and roll. Either way hurling has changed again before our eyes.
At the final whistle it was fascinating to watch the Cork players. The backs ran towards Cusack and about eight players wrapped Brian Corcoran in a bear-hug. On this team Cusack is the head of government, Corcoran the head of state.
Corcoran’s last-minute point was a moment that Cork people will cherish. It brought to mind the 1986 All-Ireland final when Jimmy Barry-Murphy closed the scoring with his final puck in a Cork jersey. Off his left, too, but from a handier angle, he won’t mind us saying. This time, though, it surely wasn’t farewell.