The most interesting aspect of Tipperary’s capitulation to Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh last Sunday is the hysterical reaction it appears to have generated within the Premier County. Here we have a team which won the last two Munster titles and, were it not for the peculiarities of Diarmuid Kirwan’s refereeing, would probably now be the defending All-Ireland champions. Yet they have one off-day and Michael Cleary is questioning the training demands being placed on intercounty players (isn’t it the same for Cork?) and calling for a return to a knockout championship. Tommy Barrett blames it all on modern new-fangled training methods and wants Tipp to go back to the way they used to play in the 1950s.

Talk about closing ranks around “the boys” as they seek to rebuild their McCarthy Cup challenge! The fact that, as County Board President and former long-time Secretary, Barrett is presumably part of the GAA power structure in Tipperary makes one wonder if there is a deeper agenda here and if some people (apart from the predictable Babs Keating) were just waiting to get their chance to have a go at Liam Sheedy.

That said, the nature of Tipperary’s collapse last Sunday was indeed surprising. To borrow a phrase from Leonard Cohen, they “died without a whimper”. Regardless of all the media hype, they must have been expecting a serious challenge from Cork. Yet they appeared to be totally unprepared for it. Maybe they thought that Cork had thrown the best they could at them in the first half, and that ageing legs would inevitably wilt after the change of ends.

What was most apparent was the lack of leadership in the team when things started to go seriously wrong as the second half unfolded. While Cork had mighty men in every line, Tipperary had nobody capable of standing in the breach belching fire and defiance.
The game’s play statistics show, in sharp relief, the extent of Tipperary’s second half collapse. In the first half Cork had 103 plays (not counting free pucks) to Tipp’s 82 but, while the Leesiders went in with a two-point lead, in fact Tipp had one more shot at goal (13-12) than Cork over the period. In the second half, Cork raised their play count slightly (to 105) while Tipp’s fell back to just 68. In that half Cork had 16 shots at goal to Tipp’s ten.

Much has already been said and written about the role of puck out strategy in Cork’s victory. In the first twenty-five minutes Dónal Óg Cusack found fellow players time and again with directed puck outs. The fact that it took Tipperary so long to cotton on to this probably says a lot about their level of mental preparation. Thereafter, Tipp managed to win the majority of Cork puck outs. In addition, in the first half, they also won most of their own puck outs. Even in the second half, Tipp managed to win half of their own puck outs (and more than half of Cork’s).

The main problem therefore was not one of winning primary possession, but of making use of it. And in this department, Cork won hands down. Whenever a Tipp player got possession in the middle third of the pitch, he was invariably engulfed in a swarm of red shirts. Cork, by contrast, were better able to make space for themselves and exert telling pressure on the Tipp defence.

They employed two principal means of doing this. The first was the route one ball to Aisake Ó hAilpín. During the course of the game Cork sent no less than twenty-two long balls into the full forward. More importantly, he won nine of them and, with more finesse and luck could have inflicted even more damage than he actually did.

The second ploy was to give the ball to Cathal Naughton and let him off. In Cork’s heyday of a few years ago, the key to their success was for their powerful half back line to gain possession, give the ball to Tom Kenny and Jerry O’Connor and let them off. With the mobility of the latter duo in decline, Naughton is now playing this key role. Furthermore, with his lightning pace, he also makes an important contribution by running in support of colleagues in possession and taking the layoff pass at top speed. Of Naughton’s 18 plays, 15 came from passes, two from picking up breaking ball and just one involved direct contact with the enemy (when he beat an opponent to a ball and flicked it away).

Last Sunday, the exact same Cork half back line gave as good a collective performance as they ever gave. In the league final, Galway dominated the midfield area. As a result a lot of the ball going into the Cork forwards was of the ‘dirty’ variety which Aisake and Michael Cussen had trouble dealing with. Against Tipperary, Cork had the platform to send in measured ball or to find Naughton at will. The question is, how will they fare against a team capable of closing them down in this area?

The Sunday Game gave the man of the match award to Aisake. There is no doubt that the younger Ó hAilpín made a massive contribution and is an obvious media favourite. However, an old-timer like An Moltóir always looks to the engine room for the key to a team’s success and at the final whistle reckoned that Ronan Curran was the main lynchpin on which Cork’s victory was based. This is borne out in the play count, with Curran topping both the play tally (20) and the quality points tally (42), based on a grading scheme of 1-4.

Fraggy Murphy actually had the second highest number of plays (19) but most of these were flicks, blocks and tackles, as reflected in a quality points tally of just 26. The second highest quality points score (38) was earned by John Gardiner (off 17 plays), just ahead of Cathal Naughton (37 points from 18 plays). Other Cork players to top the 30 quality points mark were Ben O’Connor, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, Eoin Cadogan, Patrick Horgan and Niall McCarthy.

The only Tipperary player to make it into the thirties in quality points was Brendan Maher (33 from 15 plays), whose contribution was rather overlooked in the media coverage of the game and who added further value with some excellent sideline cuts. Whereas 13 of the Cork starting outfield players scored at least 20 points (the exception was Shane O’Neill) only seven Tipperary players managed this.

Galway v Wexford
While Galway won Saturday night’s game in Nowlan Park quite comfortably in the end, it still had the potential at times to turn nasty on them. They completely dominated the first half, during which they had twenty-seven shots at goal compared with just eleven for Wexford. Yet, they only went in six points up at half time, and it could have been much closer had Gizzy Lyng not missed two straightforward chances in the closing stages of the half, and had Galway not secured a rather fortuitous goal right on the stroke of half time.

Wexford were unlucky to lose Malachy Travers, who started very well, after just eleven minutes but they had the best player on the pitch in the first half in Darren Stamp, with Keith Rossiter not far behind. They traded on more or less equal terms with their opponents for most of the second half and after fifty-five minutes were just three points in arrears, at which stage both sides had nine shots on goal each following the restart. We will never know how the game might have gone had Rory Jacob converted his gilt-edged goal chance in the 44th minute. Fair dues to Colm Callanan for an excellent reflex save but he should never have been given a chance of making it.

Eventually, Wexford’s tendency to give away soft frees (also a feature of the first half) and Galway’s greater strength on the bench made their mark, and Kevin Hynes’s goa