Cork don't just need another competitive game or two after today's clash against Clare; they need to win some of them.

Since The Strike, Cork have played 17 championship games. In eight of them they've trailed at half-time, yet only twice have they lost.

The key to this has been their capacity to practise two notions beloved by the English World Cup-winning rugby team. The first is Second-Half Thinking. Only twice in those 17 championship games have Cork failed to win the second half . . . the 2004 and 2005 Munster finals. A possible explanation for that is the other concept of Woodward's . . . TCUP. No team in hurling Thinks Clearly Under Pressure like Cork. The thing is, you can't just turn on a switch in the summer. It has to be tested during the league.

Just a little over three years ago Michael Doyle's Tipperary were overwhelming favourites to hose Cork in Thurles. Two goals from some substitute called Setanta O hAilpin changed that game and Munster hurling on its head. Even after Kilkenny reminded them a few weeks later just how far they were yet off being All Ireland champions, Cork's response was to win two gritty games in Ennis and Salthill. Just like their firstever game in the Donal O'Grady era, a one-point win over Limerick, those games stood to Cork that summer.

In 2004 they could afford not to be overly-concerned with losing both the second-halves and games to Galway, Waterford and Clare in Phase Two because they had won their fair share of close games in Phase One.

It was the same last year;

they could afford to hold back, to put on the brakes in the last quarter of their Phase Two games, having known from one-point wins in Wexford and in Tipp in Phase One that the accelerator was still there.

But so far this year they don't know. They only drew with Offaly. They had neither the fire nor the firepower for Waterford. Wexford last week was a workout rather than a test . . . and one, trust us, that will cost Wexford in the championship; by almost accepting at least one hiding per league, Wexford have become conditioned this past eight years to at least one hiding in the summer. There is no fear of that happening to Cork . . . Neil Ronan's injurytime goal against Waterford ensured that Cork are still the only team this past three leagues to avoid a defeat by seven points or more . . . but there is a fear if they're only content to be involved, rather than win, close games in the league, it will cost them in the championship. Come the summer, Cork don't want to have to go back to last September to recall the last time they mastered the art of TCUP. Whatever way you win a big game in the championship, you invariably first have won a game like it in the league.

It is the same with the Munster championship.

There is hardly a hurling commentator these days that refrains from the line that "the serious stuff" only begins in mid-July, rather than mid-May. They're wrong. Go back to the teams that comprised last year's All Ireland semi-finalists; Cork won Munster, Galway topped their qualifier group while Kilkenny and Clare had contested the league final. Last May Seamus Prendergast dismissed Waterford's poor form on the basis that Waterford were at the stage that they could afford to be indifferent to the league. Subconsciously, in the last 15 minutes in Thurles, they felt the same about Munster. It cost them repeatedly last year, just as winning early in '04 stood to them throughout the summer of '04.

It goes back to what Pat Riley, the former LA Lakers coach, calls Permission To Lose. "If you're going to be a championship team, " he said, "then you have to think championship thoughts all the time. 'It's okay to lose' can never be one of them." Brian Cody appreciates that. Clare need to; until they win another league or Munster title, they will not win an All Ireland. And even Cork must steel themselves from Permission To Lose. A team that doesn't cut corners in training shouldn't cut corners in the league. While winning the league doesn't have to be a goal, no way should losing it be either.

On holidays in Vietnam in 2004, the Cork hurlers played a game of soccer among themselves, city versus country. Before it started, Sean Og O hAilpin asked his teammates in a huddle, "Have ye any pride in Cork city?" This month they'll surely have the same competitive pride in Cork hurling.