ON THE first Sunday of the League Cork faced Dublin with an unusually stringent list of obligations for February. Four harsh trips north this spring meant they had to win. They also had to perform in a certain way. That was already proving a challenge to their minds and bodies.
The happy, freewheeling innocence of their football last year has given way to cold hearts and pragmatism. Compared to the Cork teams that collected league titles as an afterthought and an All-Ireland title in 2010, Cork don’t have the size or the numbers anymore to overwhelm most opponents regardless of their approach. They measure carefully now and cut their cloth based on the standard measurements of the modern game.
Against Dublin it was masses of men back in sweeping positions, breaking fast with ball in hand and in numbers. Afterwards Jim Gavin said he had never seen any Cork team set up with so many deep defensive lines. A week later they sallied north to Monaghan and won by a point. Of Cork’s 2-14, Colm O’Neill scored 2-6. Everyone else lined up like gunners to the rear, or were cautiously sent forward as support troops to assist him.
“Cork always played a traditional type of football,” says Monaghan’s Dick Clerkin. “You were guaranteed a more open game against them than the Ulster teams and a few others. Now they were more about making sure they had a solid mass of numbers in defence that supplied their attack with big, strong runners breaking from deep. It’s not dissimilar to a lot of teams, including ourselves.”
Monaghan felt they had played well, but Cork found a way to win. They got drawn into a windswept battle in a bog against Donegal last week, allowed Donegal to escape for their customary burn immediately after half-time and spent the rest of the match trying to bridge a five-point gap. Cork got within a point and learned a little more.
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“We tried things last year in the heat of battle which was maybe the wrong thing,” says Donncha O’Connor. “After the Munster final we tried playing a different game. Going 15 on 15 leaves your backs too exposed and Kerry walked straight through us. They came with a gameplan for the Munster final to cut out our goals and keep us down to points. We fell into the trap of playing 15 on 15.”
After tightening up against Sligo in the qualifiers last year Cork sat even deeper and bared their teeth in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Mayo in an aggressive performance that raised a few hackles, but also allowed them claw something from the summer. “We got there eventually,” says O’Connor. “It was too late, but it was a decent performance. Better than three weeks before anyway. It restored our confidence a bit, because some of that had definitely been knocked out of us.”
Making that change permanent is requiring Cork to alter some deep convictions of their hearts and minds. Last year, the management trusted their instincts and that the prevailing wave of flowing football after Dublin’s All-Ireland title would bring the game back towards Cork’s natural strengths. Instead, the tide went out after June. This winter the players talked about what needed to change. Their conclusions didn’t excite many of them, but the shadow of the previous summer hung over them all.
“We’re lucky to have lots of talented footballers but the way the game has gone, not everyone gets to play the way they want,” says Paul Kerrigan. “Players have certain roles. We have to be defensive and we’re trying to embrace that. We’re thinking about those aspects of the game more. Needs must.”
Learning a more structured style while retaining the tactical dexterity to exploit their natural footballing advantages if required is something Cork have grappled for years. The predominance of traditional man-marking football at club level also forces their hand in another way. Instead of slotting in different players during the league familiar with massed defensive systems, Cork are building from the ground up.
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Their league teams are already being picked around a core group of players suited to defend and link play quickly to attack: James Loughrey, Eoin Cadogan, Fintan Goold, Mark Collins. Michael Shields has been settled again at full-back. Although Cadogan steps up today to centrefield in the absence of Ian Maguire with the Cork under-21s, he bolted down the centre-back position for a pair of games and has the power and athletic ability to solve a long-standing problem for Cork.
Others who were parachuted into a crisis last year now have time to settle in. The O’Driscoll brothers are also tailored for Cork’s new approach. Maguire will add some physical size at centrefield, but compared to the men mountains that once populated Cork’s middle-third, he has growing to do. “Obviously, you don’t build a winning team in a year,” says O’Connor, “but there’s enough good footballers in Cork that it shouldn’t take three or four years either. A lot of the lads who were new are there again this year. It’s time we stepped up to the mark. We could use the excuse of having a lot of new fellas last year but they’re around a while now.”
Circumstances also oblige them to make the step up quickly. Since their last All-Ireland title in 2010 no other All-Ireland finalist has lost as many players as Cork. After Brian Cuthbert saw his panel half-emptied of experienced players late in 2013, Aidan Walsh and Damien Cahalane left for the hurlers this year and his management team continued to bed down. Ronan McCarthy came back as selector recently. Pat Flanagan was brought in to advance their fitness work. After building years of success on a familiar panel, the team is suddenly unfamiliar looking. Without the backing of a few wins, confidence will remain brittle.
“It goes back further,” says Kerrigan. “We lost the 2013 Munster final and never really regained that confidence and bit of swagger we had. Last year we wanted to make sure not to allow that happen again. After the Munster final we said no one would care what happened against Kerry if we won the All-Ireland, but that game changed our style of play. We knuckled down. Training was good. The panel got a bit closer. But we still felt it was a waste of a year.
“When I came through as an under-21 (in 2007) there was a lot of expectation but it’s totally different between 21s and senior. People can be patient, but as a player you really only have 10 years if you’re lucky. The last two years we’ve been sent home on the August Bank Holiday weekend. There’s no one more disappointed and critical than ourselves. For guys like me, time isn’t on our side.”
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Kerry journey to Cork today still pining over various hurts after Cork’s commanding league win last April. Last year’s Munster final is Cork’s latest sorrowful mystery with Kerry, but all that talk will be punctuated by a dozen strategically placed yerrahs to keep everything in its place. It’s March and Cork are figuring stuff out, but the time to the summer will fly.