It was in Thurles: check. They were playing Waterford, who'd lost the previous year's All Ireland semi-final by a point:

check and check again. Jimmy Barry-Murphy fielded six debutants, plus four more players whose CVs showed the grand total of 11 championship starts between them.

Cork won by 0-24 to 1-15 and three months later were All Ireland champions: bingo.

Ger Cunningham was in Semple Stadium that 13 June 1999, the day the county began life with their first new goalkeeper after Cunningham himself, unsure but hoping for the best. He'll be there again this afternoon, the day they begin life with their first new goalkeeper since then. Unsure but hoping for the best.

With Cork, as in the legal world, there is always precedent. With Cork, unlike in the legal world, it's usually auspicious precedent.

More auspicious, certainly, than the couple of weeks they've endured. The unspoken Leeside hope that two of the four suspended players would be freed to face Waterford was rudely ended at lunchtime on Tuesday, the additional fine for failing to comply with Munster Council instructions on the day shovelling salt into the wound. One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to infer that Cork's track record of springing players from the tightest of disciplinary holding cells in the past worked against them here and that the CHC's spine was stiffened by the very identity of one of the counties making the appeal. Strike down the sanctions and both they and the CAC, who on Friday upheld the suspensions and fines, were taking a wrecking ball to the GAA's entire disciplinary structure. For the new machinery to be seen to work, someone had to drown in the alphabet soup of the various committees.

In Na Piarsaigh, on Cork's northside, they were more angry than relieved when the news broke. Glad that John Gardiner's suspension had been overturned, yes, but incandescent Sean Og O hAilpin's had been upheld. He might have picked up a booking in "an oul' dopey football match somewhere" back the years, as one Na Piarsaigh clubman put it, but that was the height of it.

Cork would have lined out as selected tomorrow even if their suspended trio, who took a full part in training last week despite Tuesday's news, had been freed to play. "We had to go with the team we picked, " according to Martin Bowen, one of the selectors. "I don't think people appreciate the strain the three lads have been under."

The absence of O hAilpin, Donal Og Cusack and Diarmuid O'Sullivan will, naturally, leave not so much a hole in the Cork defence as a screaming black chasm. The trio have lined out together in each of Cork's last 26 championship matches; Cusack and O'Sullivan have lined out together in each of the county's last 35.

Since their debuts in 1997 and 1999 respectively, neither O'Sullivan nor Cusack has missed a championship fixture for Cork. The one game O hAilpin has missed since his debut as a sub against Limerick in 1996, it took a car crash to keep him out.

Whose loss will cut the most deeply today is anyone's guess;

O'Sullivan's possibly. Say what you like about him, if only because it's difficult not to.

Say what you like . . . plenty do . . . about his size, his demeanour, his lust for frequently unnecessary physical contact. Against Clare three weeks ago he managed to pull across an opponent, for which he was booked, and on one of his own teammates in the same incident. But also acknowledge that, despite indifferent displays in Munster over the years, O'Sullivan has rarely been outhurled, has rarely been outpaced and has never been outfought. And always . . . always . . . he's been a presence, a human roadblock on the edge of the square. Not today.

There isn't, Ger Cunningham believes, a minimum number of games necessary to build an understanding between a goalkeeper and his full-back. "But you'd be looking for it to happen fairly quickly, and actually you'd know fairly quickly whether it'll happen or not. You build up the relationship during the league, but it takes playing together in important championship games for a relationship to really develop."

Trust, Cunningham adds, is crucial. "The full-back has to be able to communicate with the guys alongside him and behind him. He and the goalkeeper have to have total confidence in one another. As goalie, sometimes you'll ask the full-back to do something he mightn't want to do. Once he trusts you, he will."

Having coached him last year, Cunningham has no doubts Anthony Nash . . . "an excellent shotstopper with fantastic reflexes" . . . is more than capable of filling Cusack's boots. Nash has not merely improved in the puckout department, he says, he's worked hard to improve all aspects of his game. "Coming from Kanturk, it wouldn't have been easy for him to make the breakthrough, but he's worked very hard alongside Donal Og and Martin Coleman to get to where he has."

Shane O'Neill and Kevin Hartnett, who form the left flank of the defence today, sat on the bench for the last two All Ireland finals. The pair have, as Cunningham adds, "been part of the panel for a while now. They know the system, they know the gameplan.

If and when the opportunity comes, they'll have deserved it.

It's a natural evolution."

Hartnett has the task of stepping in for Sean Og, who last August at Croke Park pared down his game to the minimum . . . one minute using his body weight legitimately, the next minute batting the ball away rather than attempting to catch it . . . to prevent Dan Shanahan getting the sliotar into his hand. Three years ago O hAilpin quietened the hitherto rampant Shanahan when switched over onto him before half-time in the Munster final.

Kevin Hartnett may be competent under the dropping ball but he is, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, no Sean Og and he's not accustomed to contesting airspace with the big man from Lismore.

Ifs and buts of a different kind apply to Joe Deane. That Deane never broadened into the player he once threatened to become is no longer a source of comment. That he ornaments the play rather than grips it by the throat, as he did in the 2000 Munster final and the first half of that year's All Ireland semi-final, is neither here nor there. Deano is Deano, his tally of 0-8 from play in his last six championship outings respectable without being in any way outstanding. But he bagged his last championship goal 10 games ago, in the 2005 provincial semi-final against this afternoon's opponents. Today offers a podium from which Deane, by some distance the team's elder, can lead his congregation. And must.

Talking of goals, Waterford also ought to be thinking along those tramlines. For all their commendable default propensity to tap over their points, here's an occasion, should the chances . . . or the halfchances . . . present themselves, for breaking the final tackle and trying to stitch a couple of early goals into Cork. The longer the underdogs stay afloat, the more they'll grow into the game.

Like the early tallies on election count day, the excuses are already in, there to be employed by Cork if necessary. It would be anathema to this team's soul to have to.

DEISE CAN COPE WITH THE BURDEN OF EXPECTATION AGAINST DEPLETED REBELS MUNSTER SHC SEMI-FINAL CORK vWATERFORD
Semple Stadium, 4.00
Referee B Kelly (Westmeath) Live, RTE Two

Enter the gladiators for a semifinal to be saluted with the same kind of fanfare, drumroll and 21gun salute that used to be reserved for the final. It's the most important match this side of the All Ireland quarter-finals, the most glamorous match this side of the All Ireland semi-finals and one that prior to the suspensions was shaping up as Waterford's best chance of beating Cork since the 2004 Munster final, four meetings ago.

Now it's a game they enter as clear favourites. How those complicated entities, the Waterford heads, will cope with the burden of expectation is an obvious issue, much as they might claim otherwise.

Regardless of its psychological aftershock, defeat would not actually mark the end of the road for Justin McCarthy's men this summer. While provincial triumphs for both counties would keep themselves and the current McCarthy Cup holders apart till the All Ireland final, here's one who believes that, should it come to it, Waterford are likelier to beat Kilkenny in July or August than in September. That said, they've reached the stage where their self-worth demands they no longer use the back door.

All the boxes Waterford ticked during the League remain ticked.

They know . . . and know they know . . . how to win tight games. They're wiser than they were a year or two ago. They're less erratic.

They defend more stringently.

They have more, and better, options. They are, in short, better.

True, they may not have . . . we'll see . . . lost the habit of hitting the front too far from home; leading across the Melling Road is rarely the recipe for Aintree glory. The ultimate game-breaker on both occasions, though, was Cork's ability, handed down through the generations, to do the simple things better at heightened moments. If the evidence of springtime counts for anything, it tells us that Waterford have acquired this gift too.

By pulling their midfielders wide on the puckout last August, Cork made it easy for Niall McCarthy to fasten onto clean low deliveries from Donal Og Cusack. Waterford won't have required a look at the video of the All Ireland final to impress on their wing-forwards the necessity to drop back and provide doubleglazing in the middle of the field.

Cork's problems in the halfforward line remain, as indicated by their crucifixion under a succession of their own puckouts midway in the first half against Clare. And Waterford are more formidable than Clare aerially;

indeed, it was Seamus Prendergast's (right) obduracy under the dropping ball during the closing 10 minutes that saw them through against Kilkenny.

Cork may have Der Kaiser Curran to put manners on Prendergast, but they don't have Sean Og to do the same on Big Dan.

Enter the gladiators, one of them without his shield. The loss of three of their back seven has to be too much for Cork, who . . .their forwards interchangeable, their backs irreplaceable . . . could quite adequately have made and mended with losing three of their front six, to bear. Well, hasn't it. . ?

Verdict Waterford CORK A Nash; B Murphy, C O'Connor, S O'Neill; J Gardiner, R Curran, K Hartnett; T Kenny, J O'Connor; K Murphy (Erin's Own) (c), N McCarthy, P Cronin; B O'Connor, K Murphy (Sars"elds), J Deane.

WATERFORD C Hennessy; E Murphy, D Prendergast, J Murray; T Browne, K McGrath, A Kearney; M Walsh (c), S Molumphy; D Shanahan, S Prendergast, E Kelly; J Kennedy, P Flynn, J Mullane.