Cork's weaknesses leave hope for remaining contenders
The aura of Kilkenny invincibility which emerged from Croke Park on Sunday must be set against the quality of the opposition they were playing.
In their four championship games prior to last Sunday, Cork played a lot of poor hurling. Even their purple second half patches against Galway and Clare must be placed in the context of the opposition they were playing against. Galway were a psychological and organisational mess. Clare needed to be further ahead at half time, given the extent of their first half dominance, and the soft goal conceded early in the second half seemed to undermine their self-belief while giving a big boost to Cork.
Clare showed in that game how vulnerable Cork were to a high-intensity physical approach, and this was apparent again last Sunday. From midfield up they are generally small in stature and liable to be horsed or psyched out of it by big, strong and highly motivated opponents. At least, unlike against Clare, they came prepared for a physical battle and largely gave as good as they got for the first twenty minutes or so. But between then and half time they essentially fell to pieces and handed the game to the Cats.
There were two key elements in this turn-around. Firstly, the Kilkenny half back line got completely on top. This Cork team’s biggest vulnerability has always been the inability of their forwards to win primary possession. However, in the first 22 minutes last Sunday they were doing quite well in this department, to the extent that the Kilkenny defenders won only one of six Cork puckouts in this period. By contrast, in the remaining 15 minutes of the half, Kilkenny won seven of Cork’s eight puckouts. This provided the vital platform for the scoring surge which gave them ultimate victory.
However, the Kilkenny cause was greatly helped by the second contributory factor in Cork’s demise i.e. a series of largely unforced errors in those final 15 first-half minutes which undermined a lot of otherwise good work on their part. These included fumbles, mishits, poorly directed balls into the forwards and short passes which went astray. In this period, Cork created three potential goal-scoring opportunities and blew them all. In the 21st minute Tom Kenny sent in a great ball which left Joe Deane one-on-one with Noel Hickey, but the Corkman fumbled his vital first touch and when he finally got the ball under control, his attempt at a point was superbly blocked down by JJ Delaney.
Then in the 30th minute Niall McCarthy sent a good ground stroke across the Kilkenny goalmouth which Jerry O’Connor failed to control and when the ball then went to his brother Ben, his shot for goal was poorly struck and went well wide. Finally, in the 32nd minute Pat Horgan handpassed the ball to Pat Cronin in a good position about 30 yards from the Cork goal. If Cronin had been able to gather the ball, his momentum might have taken him into a goalscoring position. Instead, he failed to hold the ball which went to Joe Deane who also fumbled it and then had the ignominy of again having his second-phase shot on the turn blocked by Tommy Walsh.
Cork continued to create goal chances as they sought to retrieve the game after half-time. Timmy McCarthy was somewhat unlucky to see his shot from Jerry O’Connor’s pass hit the post just above the crossbar in the 44th minute while three minutes later Pat Cronin found himself in space to the left of the Kilkenny goal but his snatched effort at a shot was blocked by the redoubtable Delaney. If either of these shots had gone in, it would have reduced Kilkenny’s lead to three points and given Cork a considerable boost. Instead, the Cats stepped on the gas again as Cork ran out of the few ideas they had to begin with, and the game simply petered out.
When Cork were the dominant force in hurling in the O’Grady/Allen era, their success was based on a couple of basic factors. Their superb halfback line was able to win primary possession and then unload the ball to their hard-running midfielders who carried it forward to create the overlaps from which most of their scores emanated. To a considerable extent, they were able to overcome their own forwards’ inability to win primary possession by employing sophisticated puckout strategies which gave them a decent chance of keeping possession from this facet of play.
Last Sunday, Cork were simply unable to get enough decent possession from either of these sources. Over the course of the game they won just one third of the Kilkenny puckouts, whereas Kilkenny won 57 per cent of Cork’s puckouts. A key factor here was that Kilkenny succeeded in completely marginalising Ronan Curran, Cork’s best ballwinner. In the second half, Curran played the ball just once. With John Gardiner struggling against Eoin Larkin, the renowned Cork halfback line was a shadow of its former self. At the same time, Donal Óg Cusack persisted throughout the game in sending puckout after puckout in the general direct of Pat Cronin on Cork’s left wing. However, as was shown in the Rebels’ game with Tipperary, Cronin is not very good at winning possession in tight, crowded situations, and Kilkenny made sure that there was a sizeable welcoming party present whenever Cusack’s puckouts descended from the sky. In one phase in the second half, Cusack sent six puckouts in a row to Cronin’s wing, and Cork won none of them.
In the face of these structural difficulties, Gerald McCarthy’s response was pathetic. An imaginative response might have been to switch Curran and Gardiner, or move one (or both) of them to midfield or into the half forwards and bring on a decent ballwinner in defence. Instead, the usual suspects (Timmy McCarthy, Fraggy Murphy and Neil Ronan) were brought out to disappear without trace. Presumably, Brian Cody had anticipated these changes and his charges knew exactly what to do when they arrived. By contrast, when Cork were struggling against Waterford in 2006, John Allen produced the then unknown Cathal Naughton out of the hat and he had a goal and a point on the board before the Waterford defenders even knew he was on the field.
Our view, therefore, is that, for all of Kilkenny’s power, skill and drive, there may still be hope for the remaining pretenders to their throne. Cork did create five possible goalscoring opportunities – would Kelly/Corbett or Mullane/Shanahan pass these up the way the Rebels did? Would the Cats’ half forwards be able to get as much possession against Conor O’Mahoney and Eamon Corcoran as they got against Cork? Would Shane McGrath (hurler of the year so far) or a Brick Walsh/Stephen Molumphy combination be able to upset the Kilkenny midfield? How would the Kilkenny halfbacks fare under the Waterford puckout with Dan Shanahan and Seamus Prendergast competing with them?
For all their dominance last Sunday, Kilkenny were still only five points up with fifteen minutes left. They scored only three points in the first twenty minutes of the second half. They will be playing a team that is significantly better than Cork in the final. The fat lady has yet to even clear her throat.
In terms of overall plays, Kilkenny shaded both halves for a total of 160 plays to Cork’s 153. However, the general quality of Kilkenny’s plays was better than Cork’s, as reflected in the quality points system used by this column, which gives one point for a basic play, two for a good play, three for an excellent play and four for a superb play. Under this system, the average points per play were 1.72 for Kilkenny and 1.61 for Cork.
Plays were much more evenly distributed among the Cork team than among the Cats, partly because the Kilkenny fullback line played very little ball (18 plays between them compared with 28 for their Cork counterparts, which may reflect the overall balance of play during the game). In addition, two of the Kilkenny forwards, Richie Power and Martin Comerford, played very little ball (just six plays each). This means that a lot of the remaining Kilkenny players played a lot of ball between them. In fact, eight of them scored at least 20 quality points, led by the clear man of the match, Eoin Larkin, with 32 points from 17 plays. He was followed by Derek Lyng and Cha Fitzpatrick (28 and 27 points, respectively, from 16 plays each), then King Henry (26 from 13), Aidan Fogarty and JJ Delaney (24 each from 14 and 13 plays, respectively), Tommy Walsh (22 from 13) and Eddie Brennan (20 from 12).
Only four Cork players made it into the twenties in terms of quality points, two of them barely. Top of the list were Jerry O’Connor (25 points from 16 plays) and brother Ben (24 points also from 16 plays), followed by Seán Óg Ó hAilpín and Tom Kenny (20 points each from 13 and 12 plays, respectively). Basically, Kilkenny had a lot of big individual performances and Cork had very few.
Individual play counts (quality points in brackets):
Kilkenny: Ryan MJ 1 (2); Kavanagh M 3 (5); Hickey N 8 (15); Tyrrell J 7 (12); Walsh T 13 (22); Hogan B 7 (12); Delaney JJ 13 (24); Fitzpatrick C 16 (27); Lyng D 16 (28); Power R 6 (7); Comerford M 6 (8); Larkin 17 (32); Brennan E 12 (20); Sheflin H 13 (26); Fogarty A 14 (24); Reid TJ 5 (7); O’Dwyer W 3 (6).
Cork: Cusack D 3 (6); O’Neill S 11 (18); O’Sullivan D 9 (16); Murphy B 8 (12); Gardiner J 10 (16); Curran R 9 (16); Ó hAilpín S 13 (20); Kenny T 12 (20); O’Connor J 16 (25); O’Connor B 16 (24); McCarthy N 5 (9); Cronin P 11 (14); Naughton C 12 (19); Deane J 3 (4); Horgan P 7 (14); McCarthy T 5 (8); Murphy K 3 (5); Ronan N 0 (0).
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