HUMILIATION FOR SAD REBELS AS RED HAND RUN RIOT
Cork fail to put up a fight as Mickey Harte’s Tyrone side cruise to a 16-point victory in Portlaoise
CORK’S anticipated backlash – one which was megaphoned by Mickey Harte in the build-up – did not deliver on the simple grounds that hurt on its own is never enough.
This is where Cork football is at the moment. Last year, they ploughed new ground by missing out on the All-Ireland quarter-finals for a third year in succession, but here they found another half acre to plough some more misery.
They will also spend a third spring in a row in the League’s second tier so the reality is that Tyrone swatted a fly here rather than lay to rest a killer bee.
This was Tyrone’s day but the depressing narrative was owned by Cork.
It is surreal to think that they started out as this decade’s first champions with all kinds of loose talk that they could dominate for the bones of a decade.
This trimming meant that they have lost their last two games by a massive 33 points, but not even that ugly number paints just how bad a team they have become.
With the exception of Mark White in goal and the hard-working Mark Collins – in keeping with his team’s performance his evening came to an undignified end when he was shown a straight red card in the 62nd minute – they were, to a man, hopelessly out of their depth.
They lack the core skills, the movement, the ambition and the attitude which are the basics when trying to compete.
Against that backdrop, hurt was never going to be enough as their manger Ronan McCarthy admitted afterwards.
‘The fact that we were hammered by Kerry doesn’t mean that we’re owed anything, you have to go out and earn it and win it so like this notion that we were entitled to something after the drubbing we got from Kerry, there’s proof, we got another one,’ said McCarthy.
As Cork disappeared down a blank hole, Tyrone once more emerged out of the qualifiers, blinking into the light.
In truth, there was little to illuminate here apart from Frank Burns sustained excellence, Connor McAliskey’s surging confidence, which yielded 1-6, and above all Peter Harte’s leadership.
The first half was so bad that the it was played to the kind of hush reserved only for the most griefstricken of funerals.
And it did represent the death of a football afternoon which had crackled as Roscommon and Armagh treated us to a scorefest in the opening game of.
If this was a concert instead of a football match, it would have been a bit like getting Bruce Springsteen to play support for Crystal Swing.
Even before the half was finished, the neutral’s emptied out of the stadium and the only wonder was that they were not joined by tortured Cork and Tyrone folk.
As it transpired, by that stage whatever vestige of intrigue had vanished, Tyrone leading at the break by 0-10 to 0-5.
It was a deserved lead but not so much that Harte’s men were twice the team that Cork were, but it was just that they were only half as worse.
Indeed this thing could have been over inside nine minutes when Tyrone carved Cork open twice but White saved smartly to dent Conor Meyler in the fifth minute, before stopping from Peter Harte four minutes later.
To be fair, Harte was the one player who seemed immune to the horrors unfolding around him on the O’Moore Park turf.
He was one of the reasons that Tyrone’s control was absolute – they led by 0-4 to 0-1 in the first quarter.
An argument, albeit a feeble one, could be made that Cork might have stayed in this longer had Michael Hurley’s 20th minute shot found the back of the net, but instead it was deflected over for a point.
That left them trailing by a point and from there things went from bad to worse.
The second half was reduced to a procession in the sunshine as Tyrone threw off the shackles to some effect.
It was hardly a tipping point, but there was no coming back for Cork after the manner which they coughed up the first goal.
Mark Collins allowed White’s 44th minute kick-out go unchallenged into Padraig Hampsey’s hands, who from there waltzed through the Cork defence to set up McAliskey for his goal.
From that point, it was a canter,
Ronan O’Neill came off the bench to flick home a goal with his first touch- after excellent approach work by Harte – while Mark Bradley did likewise late on as Tyrone emptied their bench but hardly themselves.
‘We are not playing consistently at the high level we want to,’ admitted Mickey Harte afterwards.
‘Elements of our play is very good and there are some things we are doing very well but we are making a lot of fundamental errors that the top teams would punish you for so that is something we have to work on.
‘We have got away with some things I know in the latter stages of this Championship we would pay a big price for.’ TYRONE: N Morgan; C McCarron, R McNamee, M McKernan (A McCrory, 55); T McCann, F Burns, P Harte (M Bradley, 53); C Cavanagh, P Hampsey; M Donnelly, N Sludden, C Meyler; C McShane (K McGeary, 52), R Donnelly, C McAliskey (R O’Neill, 55). Scorers: C McAliskey 1-6 (0-4f); R O’Neill 1-2 (0-2f); M Bradley 1-0; C McShane, F Burns 0-3; N Sludden 0-2; P Harte (1f), C Cavanagh, M Donnelly, R Donnelly 0-1. CORK: M White; J Loughrey (S Ryan, 58), J O’Sullivan (K O’Hanlon, 33), K Crowley; S Cronin (P Kerrigan, 40), C Kiely; I Maguire, B O’Drsicoll (M Taylor, 50); S White, M Collins, R Deane; M Hurley, B Hurley (D O’Connor, 47), L Connolly Scorers: L Connolly 0-9 (6f); M Collins 0-2; M Hurley, R Deane 0-1. Black card: J O’Sullivan 32. Yellow cards: L Connolly 18, K Crowley 59, R Deane 65. Red card: M Collins 62. Referee: M Deegan (Laois)