KILLINAN END - Tipp struggling with the pace of modern game
When Cork had racked up twelve points within twenty minutes of the start of the game last Sunday, the temptation was to do a quick calculation to figure out how bad this might actually get with that rate of scoring. Even though the teams were close on the scoreboard Cork’s scores were coming thick and fast. That rate of scoring represented 36 points per hour, and 42 when allowing for the full 70 minutes. Part of you wondered if, like a miler who runs a fast couple of laps, this pace could be kept up. But kept up it was and as it happened Cork hit exactly 42 points.
The days of judging a match or its competitiveness strictly by the number of scores has long ceased to hold any great relevance – after all Tipp garnered more scores last Sunday than in either the 2009 or 2010 All-Ireland Finals when they were considered to be going well. But the concession of 42 points by whatever means it is calculated makes life impossible. An eighteen-point beating is perhaps not what it once was given the amount of scores now but it is shocking nonetheless. All the more so in the context of what happened when the same teams met last year and when other teams played Cork. This time last year Tipp had the better of it when they met Cork and were hauled back only by a few goals. That level of energy and pace were severely lacking in this campaign.
In the 1965 Munster Final Cork shipped an eighteen-point beating from Tipp, back in the days when that magnitude of defeat was amplified by the fact that scores were not coming from all angles and distances. Irish Times’ journalist Paddy Downey recalled seeing a discarded red Cork rosette losing its colour in a pool of water as he exited the Gaelic Grounds. For him it symbolised the lifeblood of Cork hurling oozing out. Indeed, such was the mauling they took that day the future must have looked bleak indeed. An unlikely Senior All-Ireland win the following year was the outward sign of a revival, but the tsunami of under-age achievement that was about to emerge was the real foundation.
If Tipp has any silver lining to seek solace in it might be a relatively healthy level of underage performance in recent years and the county will be required to lean on that. The winter will surely see many who have given great service exit and fresh blood will emerge. How quickly it will take hold is another matter, but the team needs a huge injection of pace and energy. Anyone tempted to catastrophise about the state of Tipperary hurling after this hammering has plenty to contemplate indeed. At this point is the county merely distorting matters for other counties? Annihilation at the hands of Limerick and Cork but mustering enough to make life awkward for Waterford, who had they beaten Tipp, would have it over Cork on a head-to-head comparison no matter what happened in the Déise’s last two games.
On the other hand, Liam Cahill’s standard that Tipp are seen to uphold the integrity of the Munster championship in the last game might be said to have already been met. Without Tipp’s late surge in Walsh Park the Limerick-Waterford game would be a mere Munster semi-final to decide the identity of the provincial finalists. Instead, it is a game with everything on the line with the likelihood that the losers will exit. Imagine the possibility exists that Limerick will exit?
The way Waterford are playing, assuming they can shore up their defence, they will be a dangerous adversary for anybody. Waterford are perhaps the unlucky team in Munster. They could very easily be sitting on six points now and a place in the Munster Final had they closed out the game against Tipp and not gifted Clare a few goals with a wide-open defence. Is there one last earth-shattering twist in them?
Cork are hard to judge. Everyone looks like a superstar when running at defences and scoring at will. The first-half on Sunday looked bloodless, and the goal just before half time felt pivotal. It was its nature that was unacceptable. For any forward to get a ball in that position on the field and waltz through unhindered is not on and cannot be relied upon by Cork as the year progresses. That said, against a teams as one-paced as Kilkenny or Galway you could imagine some of these Cork forwards running riot on Jones’s Road. Yet, many an early-summer wonder in Munster has floundered on the rocks in Croke Park when different questions are asked, and they have often been clad in red too.
One final point on team support and Cork outnumbering Tipp supporters in Thurles: attendance by large numbers of supporters in sport has always been transactional. The team goes well and is likely to win? Then they’ll travel in numbers. The opposite also applies. When Cork hurlers lost to Wexford in a 2016 qualifier in Thurles some 15k attended. If they meet in an All-Ireland semi-final this year, it’ll be a full house in Croke Park. Such is life. People like glory, reflected or otherwise. Unconditional support does not exist outside the parish. Build a team and they will come.