Why Tipperary lost

Outthought and outfought, but a lot more than that too, says Enda McEvoy

Eyes down please, Tipperary readers, this pleasant Sunday morning and let's play a little game. The game is called The Most Painful Tipp Defeat of Modern Times and the ultimate choice will be yours. To start off, a look at the runners and riders. Note: we are not attempting to be facetious. This is an entirely serious and relevant exercise but it's for Tipp folk only. Ghouls, gloaters and Galway people need not apply.

Croke Park last September? Not top of the list or anywhere near it. A gutwrencher and a heartbreaker, yes, but a day of pride too. Killarney in 2004 or the All Ireland quarter-final defeats of '05 or '06 or '07? No; unpleasant also, but in the end those particular Tipperary teams got about as far as they deserved to get. The collapse against Kilkenny in the 2003 semi-final? Awful, plainly, and made worse by the concomitant shattering of the generations-old sight-of-the-jersey certainty. The drawn 1996 Munster final, when a 10-point interval lead was coughed up? Another nightmare. The day of the donkeys at Semple Stadium in 1990? The daddy of them all.

To this list, and in with a bullet, may be added a new entry. Páirc Uí Chaoimh 2010. The day hurling's coming team went to Cork and died with their Jimmy Choos on. It is early in the year, never mind early in the decade, to be talking about era-defining matches. Yet last Sunday was seismic not for what happened but for what didn't happen, for the dog in the night that failed to bark. Tipp the next All Ireland champions? Tipp to win two of the next few All Irelands? Tipp to build a little empire and become the team of the decade? Seven days ago all these castles came tumbling down out of the sky.

"Never impute a state of mind," a famous English defamation lawyer once cautioned. Heeding his advice, we therefore cannot say for definite that Tipperary believed they were as good as their last championship display but somehow forgot that that display ended in a five-point defeat. We cannot be sure that they spent the winter hearing what a great bunch of fellas they were and how they'd been robbed last September instead of lending half an ear to those voices that reckoned they'd hurled above themselves against Kilkenny and would never perform nearly as well as a collective again. We cannot assume that a small touch of cockiness – nothing overt – crept in.

But when the panel gathered on the Saturday night the players were noticeably subdued, like a group who'd suddenly realised that the scale of the challenge next day was greater than they'd imagined and that now they weren't in Kansas anymore, and on Sunday they played like a team unaware that past performances are no guarantee of future earnings and that to win the battle against Cork they'd first have to fight the battle against Cork.

Defeat would have been forgivable, however scalding, had they lost by a point or two in an eight-goal classic. Defeat would have been at least understandable had they gone in as All Ireland champions who'd wintered well. But Tipp, not Cork, were the team last Sunday with the obligation to send out the message that 2009 was prehistory and this was where the rest of their lives began. It is the first serious black mark of Liam Sheedy's reign and one that will not easily be erased. Scrub as they will over the coming weeks and months, indeed, its outline may never fully be effaced.

Is it snide to describe Cork's mentality as made of reinforced concrete and Tipp's as made of reinforced candyfloss? Given the disparity in terms of collective experience, yes. That said, had the roles been reversed and Cork been the unlucky All Ireland runners-up of eight months earlier travelling to Semple Stadium to meet hosts jumping out of the short grass, they might not have won but you just know they'd have left every fibre of their being behind.

Two points down at half-time but not even the ghost of a spurt on the restart; their centre-back, their midfield dynamo and their Young Hurler of the Year all substituted; a point from play in the second half. No fire, no anger, no stuff of champions in waiting. Tipp looked like a team who'd peaked two weeks earlier. Certainly they'd got progressively worse over the course of their challenge-match programme, flying against Dublin but barely adequate against Laois and downright poor against a scratch Clare XV.

The breadth of small crimes would fill a bulky file for the DPP. Leaving Pádraic Maher on Aisake for so long. Forgetting the evidence of the 2006 All Ireland final, which loud-hailered to the nation that the Cork corner-backs, not the wing-backs, were the men to leave unmarked when Donal Óg was pucking out. The crudeness of the supply to Eoin Kelly at full-forward. And Tipp's habit of conceding uninterrupted sequences of scores, which began in the 2008 National League and Munster finals, continued in the All Ireland semi-final, reappeared against Cork and Clare last season and culminated in ruin against Kilkenny, has calcified into a pathology.

It was the county's lowest score in the championship since the first-round defeat by Clare in 2003, their first double-digit defeat to Cork since the 1942 Munster final and only the fourth time in 80 championship meetings they'd failed to score a goal against them. The most damning criticism of Sheedy and his management team, however, is the simplest and most obvious one. They sent out a side who were outthought, outfought and outhungered by opponents who didn't include a single championship debutant. Not that Tipp could have been expected to grind it out had they been required to; in all but one of their championship wins on the Portroe man's watch they've been in the driving seat early in the second half if not sooner and have either strolled or squeaked to victory thereafter.

No grounds for consolation. None at all. Beyond painful.

emcevoy@tribune.ie

Why Cork won

Justification of the strike was always on the players' minds, writes Kieran Shannon

Minutes after his team's victory last Sunday, Donal Óg Cusack gave an interview to The Sunday Game. There was no sense of triumphalism, only a few graceful comments about Tipperarys prospects for the remainder of the year and acknowledgment that it had been a step forward for everyone connected with Cork. It was, of course, much more than that.

Even Cusack admitted that everything had been on the line. He wasn't asked to expand on what he meant by everything nor did he volunteer to do so but he'd have known exactly what was not just the rest of their season and their careers but all they'd achieved in their careers and how those careers would be remembered. Lose and they'd have been summarily dismissed as troublemakers rather than champions, those upstarts who couldnt even get to a Munster Final for four years running while Kilkenny were gunning for five All Irelands running. Now? Few may want to admit it, out of either suspicion of, or downright contempt for, the players motives in recent winters, but what they cannot even whisper we can state now: last Sunday justified the strike. To paraphrase Van, they endured days like those for days like this.

There is no way Cork would have won last Sunday, let alone in the manner they did, if they were playing under a coach they didn't believe in, just as the Cork footballers would never have overpowered Tyrone last August if Teddy Holland was their manager. Last Sunday's demolition was a victory for method and for process, the very things these Cork players downed tools for.

Two years ago at the same venue Cork threatened to blow Tipperary away but when the visitors stormed back to leave only a puck of a ball in it going in at the break, Cork's belief and that in their manager wobbled and ultimately collapsed; the proper foundations like attention to detail and trust werent in place, something Gerald McCarthy himself would admit after facilitator Cathal O'Reilly oversaw a review of the game. Last Sunday when Tipp again rallied before the break, Cork's pillars were immobile. Their belief in themselves, their manager and their system was bomb proof.

There is a line from Sun Tzu's Art of War, cited by more than one inter-county coach, which reads: a victorious army first wins and then seeks battle. A defeated army first battles and then seeks victory. If ever there is another book on Cork hurling in the early part of the 21st century, that quote will be on the page just before the first chapter. Against Limerick in 2001 the team bus never showed up and players ended up urinating in the warmup room. Cork were expected to just go out and hurl and battle first; win later; ditto against Tipp at the same venue in 2008.

Their opening game in 2010, once again in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, was won before it was ever fought. It wasn't just won with the short puckout from Cusack followed by the long ball into Aisake; the decisive period in the game was minutes 40 to 44 when Cork reeled off five points by running the ball and using the flanks and pointing from out the field.

It was won in a little detail like Jerry O'Connor barely pucking a ball so Conor O'Mahony would puck even less, and Patrick Horgan opting to aim away from Brendan Cummins' centre; in 2007, 2008 and 2009 Cork's first game in Munster also turned on a penalty and this time they made sure they weren't going to miss.

This game wasn't won over 70 minutes in Pairc Uí Chaoimh. It was won in the wee, wee hours talking and planning in the hotels of Cork the winter before last, and as a consequence, plotting with Denis Walsh a strategy to take down a side that had won back-to-back Munster titles and reached back-to-back league finals.

Reaching a league final themselves this year should not be underestimated, though some commentators have done just that. As their countyman Noel O'Leary pointed out last month in the wake of the footballers' triumph, a league final itself isn't so important as the games you win to make that final. For the last three years Cork were beaten in their opening Munster championship game by a side coming off playing in one. They were, essentially, one big game behind their opponents. This year they were the ones with that advantage.

In our championship preview I predicted Cork to win this year's Munster championship for the same reasons I predicted them to do the same at the outset of the 2003 campaign – they had five months' training uninterrupted with a coach they believed in and would be propelled by a sense of mission greater than anything the rest of Munster could muster.

Now Croke Park is opening up for them. They are not there yet. In many ways they are not really that further on than Tipp; they each have to beat one other top-five county to reach an All Ireland semi-final; in Cork's case, probably Waterford in a Munster Final; in Tipp's, the Leinster runners-up. Eighteen scores, their tally last week, will win them only one more game all summer. In truth, many of these players aren't what they once were; there has been some slippage.

That was what was a bit sad about last Sunday. If that's what these players could do with so many of them just either side of 30, what could they have done and won in the lost years that were the Gerald years? The history of the first decade of the 21st century will show that it was blessed with a spectacular team in Waterford and two truly great teams in Kilkenny and Cork and what separated those two great teams was that one had its county board fighting alongside it while the other had its county board fighting against it.

But that history is for the future. Once again it is peacetime on Leeside and all that occupies this Cork team is the now. For the first time in four years the red and white flag will be out in force on Munster Final day and it no longer matters which ones belong to Gerald sympathisers and which he'd apportion to shoppers. That was the one victory only won last Sunday.

kshannon@tribune.ie