Cork may not be the best team ever to win an All-Ireland, but they are probably the best-drilled team to do so…

They have developed a playing style and game plan which suits the available resources. They stick to this style and plan through thick and thin (having learned their lesson from last year’s Munster final). They clearly practice the basics endlessly in order to cut down the error count and maximise the possibility of creating openings. And they never panic.

The key resources available to Cork (apart from the red jersey itself) are as good a set of defenders as has ever graced a hurling field and three pacey, athletic and aware runners to scoop up loose ball around the middle third of the pitch. They possibly have the worst forward line ever to win an All-Ireland, yet now they have done it twice with the same set of forwards. The Cork short passing game is simply designed to get the runners into space in midfield, either to score from out the field or put in good ball to the inside men.

Cork don’t do big scores – an average total of less than 22 points per game in the championship this year. Joe McGrath, the old hurling coach from County Down, used to say that a team which manages twenty points will win most games. Cork are living proof of this. The main reason they don’t put up big scores is that they don’t ‘do’ goals – just one per match on average in this year’s championship. It is unlikely that any team has ever won an All-Ireland while offering such a minimal threat up front. Apart from Ben O’Connor, the other seven forwards who played for the Rebels last Sunday managed five points from play between them. Cork’s success, therefore, is based on getting their set quota of scores and then hoping that their outstanding defence and the inadequacies of the opposition will keep the opposing score below that level.

This year, these inadequacies played a key role in Cork’s ultimate success. In the quarter final, Waterford played a walking wounded, an out-of-position greenhorn and a headless chicken in their forward line and were still only a touch of genius by Brian Corcoran away from victory. Clare’s poor shooting cost them the semi-final. And last Sunday Galway did virtually everything wrong and were still fairly close at the end.

In terms of overall possession, the Tribesmen actually held the upper hand, with a total of 157 plays to Cork’s 144. They particularly dominated the second half (85-69). So where did it all go wrong for them? In true Irish form, we will answer that question by asking another. Where to begin? Galway didn’t appear to have a game plan. Their shooting was poor. Their striking was poor. They took the wrong options when in possession. They gave away possession too carelessly. They gave away too many silly frees. And they waited far too long to bring on Kevin Broderick.

There were two crucial factors in Galway’s wins over Tipperary and Kilkenny – first time striking and long diagonal balls which stretched the opponents’ defence and created space for their speedy forwards. We saw very little of this last Sunday. In the first half in particular, they sent ball after ball down the middle and straight into the Cork goal area. This is meat and drink to any good set of defenders. Expecting Niall Healy to compete in the air with Diarmuid O’Sullivan was rather clueless (Waterford did much the same thing in the quarter final). Derek Hardiman, for all the ball that he hit, was particularly guilty in this respect, repeatedly getting clean possession and then hitting the ball as hard as he could in the general direction of the Cork goal.

In the second half, Galway tried to vary it a bit, but their good intentions were repeatedly let down by poor striking which saw ball after ball falling short into the grateful clutches of unmarked Cork defenders. Indeed, a feature of this game was the amount of free possession the Leesiders were gifted by their opponents. Thus we saw Damien Joyce mishitting a clearance straight to Jerry O’Connor who promptly lashed the ball over the bar. And in the closing minutes, Derek Hardiman backed into Joyce who only succeeded in tapping the ball down to Ben O’Connor (whom Hardiman was supposed to be marking) – cue another point for Cork. In all, An Moltóir counted 1-5 scored by Cork from simple errors of this type. These include Derek Hardiman’s failure to cut out the O’Sullivan delivery which led to Cork’s goal.

These errors do not include the silly frees given away by Galway and duly punished by Cork, such as needless and obvious fouls in front of goal on Deane and Ronan, and Forde’s careless pull on Brian Murphy which gave Gardiner the chance to land a trademark bomb from out the field. Of course, you have to hand it to Cork for their ability to convert all these chances (although they still ended up with more wides than Galway). What was particularly noticeable was that Cork continued to punish mistakes and pick up the scores right to the end, whereas Galway missed several good chances as the pressure mounted coming into the closing stretch.

For the record, the sheet anchor of the Cork team was the half back line, with both Curran and Ó hAilpín making 15 plays and Gardiner 14. Behind them, Mulcahy and O’Sullivan capped excellent seasons with 12 plays each. By contrast, the two McCarthys, the original Kieran Murphy and Deane only played the ball in open play a total of 15 times between them. Only seven of Cork’s outfield players played the ball more than Dónal Óg Cusack, who had a remarkable ten plays in all.

The busiest player on the pitch was Galway’s Derek Hardiman, with 20 plays (although a number of these followed short puckouts from Liam Donoghue). Ollie Canning rowed in with 16 plays followed by Alan Kerins and Damien Hayes with 14 each. Interestingly, the Galway midfielders, between them, played the ball the same number of times as their Cork counterparts. However, in this case it was clearly a matter of “never mind the quantity, where’s the quality?”

The media devoted some attention to how Cork gave up their old reliance on short puckouts in this game. This is probably because other teams were becoming too alert to this device, and when it isn’t working it can put you under a lot of pressure. Not that the long puckouts worked too well either – in fact, Galway won almost two thirds of the Cork puckouts, while breaking even on their own. This helps to explain their overall superiority in terms of possession.

So what are the prospects of a Cork three-in-a-row? Some commentators seem to regard the Rebels as being a class above the other contenders. Yet their average margin of victory this year was just over three points – very little in hurling. A big problem for them is that no new forwards of genuine quality appear to be coming through. Living on the edge creates its own vulnerability. Some day some opposing forward is going to strike it lucky the way Niall Healy did against Kilkenny. Can the Rebels manage five games again next year without this happening?