Standing up in the City End on Sunday, with the sunshine getting stronger as the wind began to dissipate, it was very hard not to think about the last time Tipperary had come to town.
That was a wild and raucous night. A game that ebbed and flowed, a result that ultimately proved to be a fatal blow for our summer hopes, an occasion where Brian Hayes first began to move towards the centre of the stage.
Things are different now. Things have changed drastically. Sunday was nothing like that Saturday night 703 days ago. Cork is a completely different proposition now. There’s a physical menace to the team that has not been present for a long, long time. They possess a cohesion and an identity that allows the team to be potentially better than the sum of its parts. For now, it remains potential, and it will remain so until, until you know what and when.
Hayes was the only Cork forward who didn’t score in the first half on Sunday, and yet you could argue that he was the most important member of the attacking sestet. His link play, his unselfish nature, his appetite for making life as difficult as possible for defenders, his colossal height when he stands with his hurley fully extended. All of this and more makes him the fulcrum of the Cork attack that can now hurt you in many ways.
Shane Barrett has metamorphized completely from what he was then as he continues to cash in on his rich potential. Tim O’Mahony has found a home, ditto Robert Downey, while the steady improvement of Ethan Twomey would make you wonder a little how last year would have played out had he not lost out on the Offaly and Dublin games due to the concussion he picked up in Thurles.
Sunday offered you that rarest of things on a big day; time to think. Alan Connolly’s goal gave Cork the initiative, while the subsequent majors from Darragh Fitzgibbon and Ethan Twomey finished the game off. We commented from our perch that we wanted the second half to be as boring and as uneventful as possible. On that front, it delivered in spades. A wide variety of thoughts bounced around inside as the game played out to its inevitable conclusion. Excitement, terror, confidence, scepticism, a smidgen of joy, a conviction to accept the day for exactly what it was.
The league is obviously the league. That fact remained clear even as the fans poured through the gates from both ends and streamed onto the field after the game. This was no great outpouring of emotion; it was just an acknowledgement of a job well done, a moment for supporters to enjoy the feeling of winning something, for a few hours. For all the talk of progress, it is nice to have something tangible for all of the astonishing effort that all those involved put in.
And from that perspective, it’s not just the players. It’s their families, too. The thousands of miles that they have accumulated in helping their children become the young men in whom we entrust all our hopes. The vast majority of the twenty men who saw action on Sunday have something to show for their efforts, but by my reckoning Sunday was the first time that Patrick Collins earned a medal for Cork on the field of play.
He was a phenom as a young goalkeeper – a three-year minor, a five-year U21 – but he arrived on the scene just before the curve began to trend upwards. When the dust settled on Sunday, and he made it home to Ballinhassig, it must have been a nice feeling for a family who are very much steeped in hurling and who have given so much to their club and their county. It would have given them a taste for more, too.
As it always does, the League Final brought an end to the Phoney War that we commit to every spring. A Phoney War that, staggeringly, brought over 100,000 people through the gates of the Páirc on the banks of the Lee. We learned a lot, but we don’t know how much we have learned yet. The defence seems stronger, the attack seems more potent and the options at both ends seem to be more plentiful just as the panel, in general, seems to be more competitive, seems to be deeper, seems to be meaner.
Now comes the stress test, but I find it very hard to believe that anybody who matters is getting carried away with anything. The noises that we heard coming out of the camp both before and after Sunday were exactly what we wanted to hear. The focus was, is, and will be entirely on the mammoth task that awaits in Ennis, the first real meeting with Clare since the Big Show last July.
Things are different now. Things have changed. Have they changed utterly? It’s nearly time to find out.
John Coleman
The Little All-Ireland 