Cork offering little evidence that they can bring a spark to this dreary championship Carew casts a critical eye on Championship credentials of Roscommon as Sligo seek to book Connacht final place
ATIRED-LOOKING GAA season will not look to Cork for inspiration. The county’s footballers have always struggled to earn the love of their people, but the past two years has seen faith in the team shrink to an alarming degree. Ahead of their season’s opener against Tipperary in Thurles tomorrow afternoon, little is expected of them.
The county that won the 2010 AllIreland and three consecutive League titles between 2010 and 2012 slip into the season unseen.
Last week, the presence of Down in that 2010 final was referenced as a means of measuring their subsequent decline. From losing to Cork that day to plummeting to a point where Monaghan can slash through them at will and beat them by 19 points in the provincial championship, the decline of the Mourne men has been steep.
But the county that ended victoriLeague ous that wet September day have experienced many more bad days than good since then themselves. Cork under Conor Counihan were long criticised as a team that underperformed; the argument was that their array of big, athletic men and the physical fitness that ensured they were never beaten in a match should have delivered more than one Championship during their pomp.
Yet now people wonder that they won an All-Ireland at all, that perhaps Counihan wrung glory out of a group that were game but limited. Graham Canty’s 2010 champions are suffering and seeing their achievements soured by the deficiencies in the generation that succeeded them.
Peadar Healy was a selector with Counihan and an influential coaching figure within the group. He is one of the few remaining links to that team, Eoin Cadogan and Paul Kerrigan the prominent playing ones.
The departures from the squad of Ken O’Halloran and Michael Shields in disputed circumstances after the broke, at least for now, two other links with that group from six years ago.
The dropping of Shields and O’Halloran also raised rumours of a disciplinary breach during a training trip to Portugal, but that rumour has been dismissed by management.
However, stories irresistibly congregate around a struggling squad, like snoops at a crash scene, and after the spring Cork endured, gossip was inevitable.
But tall stories were the least of the problems exposed by relegation to Division 2.
Cork started the League in ebullient form, battering Mayo to win by nine points. In round two, Donegal hammered them by 10, before the result in round three that has disfigured their year so far.
They scored 3-10 at home against Roscommon; the problem was the 425 they let in at the other end. A subsequent gusty four-point loss to Dublin in Croke Park did not convince the growing assembly of doubters, but wins over Monaghan and Down meant their League status was their own to decide.
They visited Tralee in the last round and lost by five points to Kerry. Shields was introduced as a substitute in that match but was sent off in injury time for an elbow on an opponent.
Relegation was followed by recrimination and talk of discord, but the truth is the Cork footballers, long struggling to win substantial support in a county whose passion is primarily directed to hurling, have been listing for years.
They lost narrowly to Mayo in 2011 and Donegal in 2012 in the Championship, exits to two of the best teams in Ireland suggesting there was a challenge left in the group husbanded by Counihan.
They went out in the quarter-finals to eventual champions Dublin in 2013, but the troubles for this group truly began in the Munster final in 2014.
By then Brian Cuthbert was in charge. His honourable two-year tenure struggled to convince some within the county, but the scalding his team received against Kerry in Páirc Uí Chaoimh undermined him for the rest of his reign.
They lost by 12 points, 0-24 to 0-12, on an afternoon that was supposed to be triumphant. It was the last football match played at the creaking old ground before it was shut for rebuilding, but the day turned into one long humiliation for Cuthbert and his men.
It also mercilessly exposed the defensive problems that remain their most serious concern. James O’Donoghue destroyed Shields, but Cork’s failure to address the space Kerry were exploiting in front of
The truth is that the Cork footballers have been listing for years
their forwards was flabbergasting.
They recovered enough to push Mayo to a point in the quarterfinals, but another provincial defeat to Kerry last year pitched them back into the qualifiers – and the match that finished Cuthbert.
Cork should probably have beaten Kerry in Killarney in their first Munster final, but their failure to do so meant their great rivals could ease past them in a downpour in the replay. The manager was evidently devastated by that outcome; Cuthbert was barely able to talk after the match.
But their subsequent eight-point defeat to a decidedly ordinary Kildare in the qualifiers made his position effectively untenable, and his departure was no surprise. That 2014 loss to Kerry, the Kildare embarrassment and the shambles against Roscommon in the league this year are the matches that have done most damage to Cork in the modern era. If snobbery and pig-headedness prevented many from loving Counihan’s side, they had to admire them,
their power and their enormous courage. It has been too easy to dismiss the teams of Cuthbert, and the selections that Healy played in the League this year. Conceding 4-25 at home leaves a group in a weak position, not merely in terms of results and standings, but also in the battle to convince the public and themselves that they can contend again.
Outside of Dublin and a trailing big three or four, there is space for emerging sides with tactical discipline. The quarter-finals of the Championship should be the minimum acceptable target for a county of Cork’s history and resources.
But in truth, they should survey the sustained excellence of Donegal and Monaghan and be shamed into wondering why not them?
Long discounted as sleeping giants, they can stir again. But there is no evidence yet to regard them as anything but drowsy also-rans. The fight to convince the world, and themselves, is ready to resume. IN THE land of the mumbled whisper, Niall Carew is one who prefers to clear the throat.
Perhaps it is down to the four years he spent in the company of Kieran McGeeney in the Kildare dug-out, but the Sligo manager can’t bring himself to learn the foreign language that is manager-speak.
The lingo where cuteness is deemed to be conferred on those who can talk the most and say the least, while seeking to put your opponents on a lofty pedestal and presenting your own as a sacrificial offering.
Should Carew have chosen to go down that road, he would hardly have invited raised eyebrows.
Two divisions and a whole world of expectations separate his team from the Roscommon one they will eye-ball today.
It is not even a punt that most gamblers would deem worth taking because all the chips are hoarded on one side of the table.
Roscommon come here on the back of reaching the Allianz League semi-finals, having received the mother of all wake-up calls by New York, while armed with home advantage and the motivation of putting manners on a team that embarrassed them 12 months ago.
Had Carew wanted to take cover in the land of cliché, he would have been spoilt for choice, but instead he has no problem sharing with the world what he has already told his players.
‘There is no point in me blowing up Roscommon, I think this is a great opportunity and it is one that we are looking forward to taking,’ says Carew.
‘I would be very, very disappointed if we don’t come away with a win ‘We are not going out to give a performance, we have to go out and win this game.
‘That is what it is all about. We want to get this team to the last eight. For me, that’s a realistic target,’ insists Carew.
It is setting the bar high, but then Sligo has been a last-12 team for the past two seasons.
And what thrilled about last year’s Connacht semi-final win was that it was not your typical backs-to –the-wall underdogs’ triumph.
They were controlled, composed and left no room for argument as to the merits of their four-point win at the death.
There is still something to be squeezed from that result, suggests Carew.
‘I think the jury is still out on Roscommon in terms of that they haven’t done it in the Championship. Leitrim finished bottom of Division 4, New York are not in any division so they are still learning their trade at Championship level which is a completely different animal to the League.
‘I still think that they have a lot to prove in Championship and they haven’t done it yet so the pressure is on them at home.
‘If for example things are not going well, the crowd can get on your back very quick. They are supposed to win this game by 10 points and if they are not on top that will spill out onto the field and the younger players could feel it.
‘It is big pressure for them because they are supposed to win this and they are supposed to be playing Mayo in the final.
‘Obviously that is great for us. We have beaten them before. We have beaten these same players before,’ he reiterates.
But to do so again, Sligo will have to be a better team than they were 12 months ago. The jury is also out on that one.
They have lost two leaders in Ross Donovan and David Kelly, while their spring form was so sluggish that there was a period when they were left staring at the prospect of the drop to Division 4.
On the flip side, when they needed a result they got it and in some style by seeing off the previously unbeaten Kildare.
That was not by accident easier, they had improved as the League progressed – Mark Breheny, Adrian Marren and Pat Hughes missed large chunks of the spring with injuries – but the team found their legs at the tail-end of the campaign.
The return of former AllStar Charlie Harrison and Adrian McIntyre has beefed up Carew’s options – the latter addressing an obvious flaw in last year’s team.
‘Adrian is a massive plus at midfield, we are able to win aerial ball now so we don’t have to be looking for short kickouts like we were all last year.
‘We have ball winners out the field now and if I am being honest I think that we are stronger this year than we were last year.’ And wiser, too. In the aftermath of his great triumph as a manager, came his toughest day.
Sligo coughed up six goals as they were roasted for Mayo’s amusement in the final last year.
He insists the buck stops with him for that, not out of a sense of duty, but because he can finger the reason for the reversal..
‘We definitely got it wrong on the line the way that we set up. We really went for it early on but we left ourselves wide open. I think if we were to do all that again… like we were much more cautious against Roscommon but we went for the jugular against Mayo and we kind of forced the boys to go for it.
‘When you are underdogs going into a game like we were against Roscommon you want to stay in the game for as long as you can and then go for it.
So we got that wrong and our coaching language was poor leading up to that game in terms of keeping it high up the field.
Against Roscommon, even though we left the four lads up in attack, we were still very cautious in terms of our defensive unit.
‘I felt against Mayo we were more “press-up high” which cost us. Your language is very important leading into games because players pick up on every word.
‘Sometimes fear is good because it keeps you on your toes all the time.
‘But this is where we want to be.
‘This is the game that we have been looking forward to from the start of the year because we want to put what happened to us in the Connacht final... we need to get back and put that right.’
I still think they have a lot to prove in the Championship