Return to ‘Corkness’ more about attitude than tactics
Although it irked supporters and observers of Clare football that the commentary surrounding the team’s recent nine-point win over Cork was less about their own brilliance as the feebleness of the away challenge, even amongst Colm Collins’ backroom team, the initial reaction upon meeting this column afterwards was “God, what’s happened to Cork football?”
As one of them would elaborate, what they saw in red out on that field was a group of talented but tentative footballers, devoid of confidence and conviction. And in their view, much of that timidity stemmed from the style of football those players were being asked to play. It was as if the subtle shift that was taking place in football had been lost on Cork.
While more aspiring teams were now becoming more offensively geared — like Donegal, who had also visited Cusack Park two weeks earlier and prevailed despite being down multiple All Star-calibre players, or Mayo, Kerry, Monaghan, indeed Clare themselves — Cork were reverting to a safety-first approach. In trying to catch up on how football had moved on since 2010, Cork were being left behind once again.
To be fair to Ronan McCarthy, Cork had to do something after leaking so many scores last summer. Kerry took them for 3-18 in the Munster final; Tyrone, 3-20 in the qualifiers.
Part of his revamp for 2019 has been to enlist Jason Ryan as an advisor, the Waterford native having plenty of external experience, including his last game as an inter-county manager when his Kildare team gave up seven goals in a chastening defeat to Kerry in 2015. (It was notable last Sunday week that when Ryan took his place up in the Cusack Park gantry, he was fully kitted out in Cork garb — a measure of how invested he is in this Cork project rather than the deflection of responsibility that wearing normal civvies can project).
Clearly both McCarthy and Ryan are keen that the next troops they send out onto the championship battlefield aren’t as naïve as the last ones they dispatched.
And in their search for a suitable template from which to start from, it seems as if they’ve settled on something close to the Galway 2018 model which Kevin Walsh, along with Paddy Tally, adapted in response to how they too had been carved up by Kerry in the previous championship.
Getting bodies back though is only part of the remedy. Using your body and letting your opponent’s body know all about it has to form part of the equation too.
In Ennis last Sunday week, the gulf in intensity and physicality between the two teams was striking.
Clare themselves had also been hammered and humiliated by Kerry last summer, having headed to Killarney on the back of the county’s highest league position in 25 years, only to be pummelled 0-32 to 0-10. As Collins would later tell the assembled media after his team’s win over Cork, Clare have no intention of being so porous in 2019. It’s something his latest coach Brian Carson has prioritised and addressed on the training ground. Against Cork, the fruits of that labour showed. Their one-to-one and collective tackling and defending was exemplary. Clare were disciplined — and yet they were aggressive. Both when Cork had the ball and then when they themselves had the ball, driving through for three goals as well as kicking 13 points.
Galway were likewise notably aggressive last year, up until the final eight days of their season. Physically and mentally, they left a dent on opponents, just as their provincial tormentors Mayo used to systematically do unto them during their march to five Connacht titles in a row.
Cork in Ennis exhibited no such aggression, an all-too-common failing since Killarney 2015.
There’s been a lot of talk and hot air recently about what constitutes Corkness, from the smug to the agnostic. But there actually is such a thing, especially of the sporting variety, a combination of cuteness, confidence, and above all, a strong dose of crankiness. It’s Roy Keane, Billy Morgan, Ronan O’Gara, Tom O’Sullivan on the opening day of Neptune Stadium.
In the opening chapter of Hanging from the Rafters, the story of his sport and club, O’Sullivan recalls how slighted he felt when a member of the opposing St Vincent’s Dublin side failed to acknowledge him in a pre-match exchange, symptomatic of how Dublin basketball had traditionally tended to look down its nose on its Cork counterparts. He hadn’t forgotten either that only the previous season he couldn’t make the Neptune starting five and even in his own club he’d had his doubters. The rage to win and teach respect was informed by a hint of disrespect. Like Munster rugby, Cork basketball was propelled by was a mix of bitterness and pride.
“[Elsewhere] they merely loved to play the game,” it was noted in Rafters.
In Cork they lived to play the game. They had to win the game… Hunger, second-city paranoia, scrappy-knees syndrome, Norrie Fire, call it what you like, but in their eyes a [Cork player] was going to beat an [opponent] to that ball.
What you could also call it is Corkness, and just like O’Sullivan would demonstrate it repeatedly to become the most successful player ever in Irish domestic basketball, Ronan McCarthy has exhibited it too. After a frustrated Maurice Fitzgerald gave him a dunt upon kicking a wide early on in the 1999 Munster final, McCarthy duly displayed no reverence to whom he was marking by standing up to and dragging down his esteemed opponent who he’d keep scoreless for the day.
In that flashpoint during that famous day in the rain, McCarthy personified Cork’s defiance. Twenty years on, he must summon that same spirit from his current charges.
There are a lot of statement games this weekend in the NFL, especially on Saturday night. Mayo, for as well and often as they’ve put it up to Dublin, are now 13 games and counting without a win over Jim Gavin; now is as good a time as any to break that duck, take Dublin out of the league final equation and open up a spot in it for themselves. Dublin, meanwhile, will want to remind Mayo of the hierarchy. In Omagh, Tyrone and Monaghan can hardly afford another loss. But in our eyes, the biggest game of the lot is under the lights at Páirc Uí Rinn. Meath football can hardly endure another season in Division Two while Cork football can hardly tolerate relegation to Division Three.
The Cork football public has reason to be doubtful about the McCarthy project. Does he feel the massed defence is genuinely Cork’s best chance to win in Division Two or merely the best way to avoid another trimming to Kerry in July? At a county board meeting a fortnight ago, chairperson Tracey Kennedy indicated that McCarthy had hinted that Cork’s early-season difficulties could be partly attributed to not yet finding replacements for Ciaran O’Sullivan and Eamonn Ryan as selectors. Seven months on from Cork’s exit from the 2018 championship, can that really be excusable or acceptable?
But as Tony Leen would point out in a recent Irish Examiner podcast, if there is any sense of pride — Corkness — about the Cork public, then they owe it to the Cork jersey to make their way to Christy Ring Park in anticipation that the team’s current circumstances, whatever about the Meath jersey, will prompt the necessary response.
The two-week break should have been invaluable to McCarthy and his coaches to further bed in the system and style of play that they want — but this one is more about attitude than tactics.
Even when Cork exited the 2014 and 2017 championship to Mayo there was a sense of honour, not dismay, among the public because there had been a show of defiance by the team. Against Meath, passion, not passivity, must inform everything that Cork do.
