Giving Jerry O'Connor his due ... and Cork their comeuppance
An Moltóir has long been bemused by the shallowness of the match analyses produced by many highly-paid sports journalists…
This was brought home by the assessment of the individual performances of the Irish rugby team after one of their recent debacles penned by a writer in a certain Sunday newspaper whose ego is almost as big as the excess fat which he himself carried onto the field in his playing days. A key factor in this assessment were exceptional individual plays produced by individual players, such as a saving tackle, a ball won on the other team’s throw, or a penetrating break made from midfield.
An Moltóir’s immediate response was to ask what these players were doing for the remainder of the day. How many tackles did they miss, how many uncompleted passes did they deliver, how many balls did they drop or turn over to the opposition? Like in American sport, most top-class rugby teams nowadays employ video analysts and statisticians precisely to provide answers to these and similar questions. While the brilliant piece of improvisation or the pure fluke may deliver a victory now and again, in the long run it is the teams which do the business in the trenches who collect the trophies.
However, media coverage of big sporting occasions is all about the visible, the brilliant and the sensational and it is these events, and those who produce them, which get the full treatment. So the player who scores three luminous points is eulogised, despite the fact that six scores have gone to the other team because the player he was supposed to be marking has, unchallenged, sent in a series of high-quality deliveries to his own forwards.
This state of mind has repeatedly been a feature of All Stars selections in hurling and football down through the years. One remembers Liam Currams getting an All Star because of two spectacular points scored in the 1981 All-Ireland final. Peter Canavan’s selection over Brian McGuigan is a more immediate case in point. Not only should McGuigan have received an All Star, he should also have been named Man of the Match in the All-Ireland final. Apart from his own scoring feats, his role in the way Tyrone play the game is absolutely crucial. The sheer intelligence of his play, his awareness of what is possible in particular situations, is absolutely phenomenal. But he rarely produces the spectacular, and so gets edged out for an All Star by a player who specialises in the spectacular.
Jerry O’Connor is to Cork what McGuigan is to Tyrone, and at least this year he finally got some kind of recognition for this. In his analyses of match performances, An Moltóir has been arguing for years how crucial O’Connor has been to Cork’s success, but he doesn’t do spectacular, unlike his brother, or Tom Kenny (a real specialist in spectacular moments) or John Gardiner. The fact that he was named player of the year may indicate that there is a better quality of hurling than football journalist out there.
There is currently some debate on this website about the nature of the Cork running game. It has been argued that only a small number of the Cork team are, in fact, runners. What is important is how crucial these runners are to the Cork game plan. Cork have a very poor set of forwards who simply cannot cope with a conventional long-ball game. So their basic plan is either to create space to shoot from out the field, or to create overlaps so that the forwards have a high probability of getting possession in space from balls delivered into them.
A key element in this game plan is to minimise the striking of “blind” balls. When Dave Bennett of Waterford gets a ball in midfield, he is inclined to strike it over his shoulder in the general direction of the opposition goal. When Jerry O’Connor gets a ball in the same situation, he runs with it, using either a side-step or pace to get in the clear so that he can look up before delivering the ball. Many people (including Cork supporters themselves) moan at the amount of apparently needless hand-passing Cork do around their own halfback line, but the whole point is to get the ball eventually to a player who is in the clear and looking up to pinpoint where is delivery will end up.
In some senses, it is a simple plan, built largely around the strengths and weaknesses of the available players. In the same way, the great Kerry football team of the 1970s had a simple device of holding the ball around midfield and then playing a sideways handpass to a colleague steaming up from behind who, by bursting into the clear, was in a position to begin the sequence of overlaps and handpasses which led to a large proportion of that team’s scores. But, like the current Cork team, they did have the pace and athleticism to make the plan work, and they put in endless hours of practice to ensure it worked.
The question has been asked: how can the Cork running game be counteracted? In one sense, it doesn’t have to counteracted. As pointed out in this column before, Cork don’t do big scores, they do not score goals, and they rarely win matches by big margins. So, if other teams train harder, practise more and work harder in matches, that should be enough to close the gap. In particular, it is necessary to put the Cork rearguard under more pressure, and not allow them to get the clean possession which is the first step in getting the running game under way. The kind of high balls into the edge of the square which both Waterford and Galway persevered with in their games with the Rebels this year are simply not good enough. And were it not for Clare’s wayward shooting, Cork would never have got to the All-Ireland final.
In terms of directly counteracting the Cork running game, two ploys present themselves. One is to cling to the O’Connors and Kenny like limpets, in order to minimise the amount of times the ball is passed to them. Easier said than done, but Ballygunner’s Alan Kirwan gave three recent master classes in man-marking, against John Mullane in the Waterford county final, against Garryspillane’s TJ Ryan in the Munster club championship and against Ben O’Connor himself in the Munster final. This is a case of picking horses for courses, rather than putting your own best midfielders out and hoping that they will do more damage than the O’Connors or Kenny (an unlikely scenario).
The other possible ploy to counteract Cork is to place a pacy player between your halfback line and midfield to meet the Cork runners coming out of midfield. The idea here is to allow your defenders to man-mark the Cork forwards without having to sacrifice one to meet the incoming speed merchant. Once you do that, your defensive formation begins to break up, thereby creating scoring space for the forwards. A key question here is how Cork would react to a loose player (probably a designated corner forward) being deployed like this. But even if they put their own loose player out to mark him, not only is that player likely to be out of position, but it begins to clog up the playing area around the middle which generally will not suit the Cork game plan.
Clare used a ploy similar to this to great effect against Kilkenny last year. But while they greatly reduced the Cats’ scoring potential as a result, it was still better than what a feeble Banner forward line was able to manage. Even without this ploy, Clare had Cork on the edge this year but frontline frailty again meant they were unable to push them over. It has been Cork’s good fortune that the teams with the application haven’t had the forwards, and the teams with the forwards haven’t had the application or the field craft. But it won’t take too much to bridge the gap.
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