Killing Time

Ageing is even harder than you think it would be. Nothing will ever adequately prepare you for the torturously slow and painful realisation that there are many things that you will never, ever do again, and that that list will only grow, lengthen and make your heart ache all the more as the years slip by.

And they do just slip by, faster and faster as you try, desperately, to cling onto them. But, you can’t, you know that you can’t, and before you even know it, it’s the guts of 20 years since a younger version of yourself, somebody you’d barely even recognise, was standing on Hill 16, as Ben O’Connor cracked the ball right towards the place where you were standing. That summer seemed to last forever, now they just disappear in the blink of eye. Much like the new hurling seasons.

The memory begins to slip too. While events from your youth continue to haunt and taunt you down every road and around every corner, the events of the past week, the past month, the past year all just blur into a long sentence without punctuation, almost impossible to decipher. And thus a meaningless game played in Innishannon 23 years ago sometimes feels far more real than yesterday’s breakfast. As scary (or pathetic?) as that is, imagine how hard it would be to read the past were it not for the reference points that the games give us? What would 1990 be without the Double? 1999 without the tailbacks in Fermoy, Mitchelstown and beyond? 2013 without Brian Gavin?

However, there is no doubt that this summer will be remembered, no matter what way it all turns out. Be you young, or old, or somewhere in between, the visceral nature of that night down the Páirc and that day that followed in Thurles had a transcendent feel that has lodged somewhere deep in the psyche.

Those glorious days from the beating of Limerick to the evisceration of Tipperary now feel like they happened a lifetime ago. They were followed by an insufferable week in limbo as we found ourselves relying on the very men that we had vanquished to ensure that our summer wouldn’t be over before it really began, despite how real it all felt. Anyway, that’s enough about Limerick, until next week.

Since then, it’s all been about killing time. For the first time in a long time, it’s all begun to move a little more slowly. The giddiness that accompanied those heady days in May has, thankfully, dissipated. Tullamore and Thurles felt like a two-day hangover – another sad product of senescence –  as the reality of what’s to come sank in and began to sow some seeds of doubt.

Cork were very much in ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ territory from those two sojourns north. Annihilate Offaly and dismiss Dublin and nobody would have taken much notice. Cork would have just floated on to Croker without asking too many questions of themselves. As it turns out, those two games were a fair bit more complex then we would have expected.

Far from setting Cork free, the relief of qualification seems to have got them into a bit of a tangle. In Band of Brothers Ronald Spiers said that the only hope a soldier has of surviving a war is to accept the fact that he is already dead. The losses to Waterford and Clare put Cork in that type of position, and they acted accordingly. Then, all of a sudden, there was something to lose again, and things tightened up a bit, as they have done before. This was, after all, the third time that Cork had finished third in the Munster Round Robin, and neither of the previous escapes had led to victory.

In 2019 a routine dismissal of Westmeath was followed by the nightmare of yet another lesson from Kilkenny. In 2022 an underwhelming win over Antrim preceded a horror show against Galway. What was different about this year, however, was the opposition. Kilkenny and Galway are, after all, Kilkenny and Galway. And Dublin are Dublin. This time it was just different, and extremely difficult, for supporters, at least, not to get lost in the mist of what may happen should everything go according to plan.

If there was one word to describe the last two wins, it would be flat. Everything about them was flat, both on the field and off of it. We went from a provincial competition that required everything to the closest thing you can get to a fait accompli in hurling. It’s hard to play when it all feels inevitable, and it’s hard to watch too. But they had to play, and we had to watch. It wasn’t thrilling, it wasn’t particularly enjoyable, it was underwhelming, but it had to be done.

And now it is done and Cork are heading to Croker with plenty of questions to answer, with plenty of decisions to be made. Better that than to be going in there on a wave of giddiness supplemented by couple of blow outs?

I think so. But still, those questions need to be answered.

John Coleman