Gan Dabht?

I’ve always loved Easter. It’s a time of infinite hope, a time where the impossible
becomes real, a time when life can follow death. Whenever it falls, the natural world
is beginning to come to life, the ground is beginning to firm up and the evenings that
had once brought darkness and closure now bring light and possibilities.

The drama around the Passion of Our Lord will always have the capacity to
captivate. There is something in the symbolism and iconography of it all for
everyone, particularly with the way in which the hurling world is rushing to anoint
Cork as everything and anything these past few weeks. As we all know, things
deteriorated rapidly for our Saviour after he was welcomed triumphantly into
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Five days later he was on the cross.

Then there’s Judas Iscariot leaking vital information from the camp before realising the extent of his folly all too late. There’s Peter taking no prisoners in the Garden of Gethsemane. There’s Barrabas being set free at the expense of Jesus that in turn made Pontius Pilate wash his hands of it all when the
crowd went against him. There’s the scourging, the falling. There’s Mary, the mother of all of the grief. There’s the rising. There’s Simon of Cyrene and then there’s the Roman centurions, humiliating our Lord and drawing lots for what was left of him when it was all over.

You can take what you want from that imagery, but more than anything else, Easter
is a leap of faith, a test of our conviction, a stern examination of the true nature of our
belief. It seems that Cork has improved significantly in the past few months. It’s now time to find out about the true nature of that improvement.

Doubting Thomas has always been one of my favourite characters from the story. He
could only be convinced by what he saw, believe what he felt. And let’s face it, if
somebody you know did really claim that they had come back from the dead, you’d
like to think that you’d thoroughly examine all of the evidence before you went along
with it.

There’s nothing wrong with doubt in the sporting world. In fact, you could argue that
an element of it is essential because there’s nothing scarier than certainty. An
element of doubt should keep you focused, it should help you to work even harder to
dispel it, it should help you to create a reservoir of resilience. The fact of the matter is that despite the utter nonsense being spouted about Cork this spring, there is plenty there to cast doubt over our
aspirations. And, at the moment, the prospect of playing Clare in Ennis should have
anyone who knows anything thinking long and hard about what lies ahead on
Sunday.

The reigning All-Ireland champions have beaten us everywhere and in every way
over the past few years. They’ve beaten us when it matters. They’ve beaten us when
it matters the most. They’ve even beaten us when it didn’t matter at all. They’ve
beaten us in Ennis. They’ve beaten us in SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh. They’ve beaten us in
Thurles. They’ve beaten us in Croke Park. They’ve beaten us in a shootout. They’ve
beaten us in an arm-wrestle. At times, they’ve just beaten us up. In general, they’ve just been better, more consistent, and more ruthless. They’re a brilliant team. On Sunday we’ll take them on with fourteen of the men who couldn’t beat them last April, with fourteen of the men who couldn’t defeat them last July.

The disaster that was 2019 probably sums up the nature of the rivalry best with
Sunday in mind. Clare was out. Cork had everything to play for. Clare won by five
points while Cork, who never really looked like winning, got out of the group thanks
to Tipperary beating Limerick. The results only delayed the inevitable.

Amidst the thunder and lightning in Ennis that day, we saw Clare at their most
visceral as they hurled with raw and unbridled abandon and aggression. They felt
slighted then, imagine what awaits us in Ennis this weekend. Anybody who has a
peek at social media doesn’t even have to imagine what they think of all of the noise
that surrounds Cork at the moment.

And there is an awful lot of noise around Cork at the moment. However, it’s all external,
and must be taken for what it is, undiluted mendacity. There’s always a lot of noise around Cork hurling.
Shane Kingston summed it up best earlier in the week. There’s always hype, and
when things are going bad, that hype is at its most malignant. We’ve had enough of
the utter false concern from without when it comes to the state of Cork hurling over
the past twenty years. Whoever they’re trying to convince of where we are now, it’s
not any of us here.

Since taking over as manager of the Cork hurling team, Pat Ryan has instilled a
consistency of performance into Cork that had been absent for a long time. They
now tend to stay in games right up to the final whistle. The next step in the journey is
for Cork to get over the line more often in games like that. We do not really know what to
expect on Sunday. We don’t really know how good Cork or Clare are. But I think we
can expect a performance, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone who matters is
thinking of anything else other than that.

Will that performance be enough to get over the line?

The rock will soon be rolled back and all will be revealed on Easter Sunday.

John Coleman