There is surprise that the Cork-Tipperary rivalry has taken so long to arrive on hurling’s biggest stage, especially as there have already been five all-Munster finals since such a fixture became a possibility in 1997.
Hurling first took the plunge to allow beaten teams to re-enter the All-Ireland with the original amnesty for defeated provincial finalists – the back door, as was the slightly dismissive terminology. Football followed with a broad programme of second chances for everyone defeated in their province.
So, 28 years ago marked a revolution. From then on, you could end up in an All-Ireland final against a team you had already played. This was a culture shift and it didn’t sit easily with everyone. The games and their championships were meant to be about sudden death with all its pressures and finality.
Instead, teams might end up having to defeat a rival twice, or worse, lose to opponents they had previously beaten.
RM Block
Sunday is the 10th meeting of finalists who originated in the same province. So far, six of those fixtures have gone the way of the previous winners, leaving three that didn’t. Two of those three went to replays.
Daniel Kearney played for Cork in 2013. Under Jimmy Barry-Murphy, they lost the Munster final to Limerick, having defeated Clare, who they ended up playing in that year’s All-Ireland final. Was there the dynamic of worrying about the losers having learned more from defeat than they had themselves in victory?
“In terms of the game plan, your mentality, there’s so much value and richness in those hard moments,” said Kearney. “That’s really where, if you stop and understand what happened, understand the areas of improvement you can get, that’s better than 20 training sessions.”
Kearney believes too much time can be spent second guessing opponents that you already know quite well.
[ Three Munster finals that created the mythos of Tipperary v CorkOpens in new window ]
“You can focus too much on the other team when you already know them and maybe are over-familiar with them – trying to be too cute and over-thinking what they’re going to do again or what will they change.
“That’s where I find managers can get it wrong, when you just really need to focus on the things you need to get right.”
Margins were small. With time up, Domhnall O’Donovan equalised with the only point of his intercounty career. Cork had come within seconds of the title, which must have made it hard going into the replay.
“Definitely. The momentum was with Clare.”
It’s one thing when there isn’t much between the teams on either day. David Collins’s experience was different. He and his Galway teammates had hammered All-Ireland champions Kilkenny in the Leinster final to win the county’s first O’Keeffe Cup in 2012 – by 10 points.
Had the scale of that win made them apprehensive about facing the same opponents less than two months later?
“When you beat a team like that, you know there’s a sting in the tail coming. I’ll always remember the Leinster final being epic and we played out of our skins but could we emulate that again? Could we reach those standards again? It was going to be very difficult obviously and we knew that Kilkenny now had a cause and a stick to beat us with.
“We were good enough to do it the first day, so why are we not good enough, now?”
They did find a performance again and led by five at half-time, but it ended in a draw. Galway had a late injury before the replay when goalkeeper James Skehill was ruled out. The team’s confidence was draining away.
“The biggest thing I found was your energy was so up and you were peaking and everything was built for the first game. And the next thing you’re realising, ‘oh, we should have won that game’.”
Over-thinking the second match or harbouring anxieties about emulating an exceptional performance are two separate pitfalls. The last word goes to Clare, who began the process in the first year of 1997 when they had to beat Tipperary in both the Munster and All-Ireland finals.
Frank Lohan played in both matches and recalls that they simply treated it as match five on their All-Ireland schedule.
“Yeah, because it’s going to be the pinnacle of what you’re about and you’d be aware it doesn’t happen too often. So, you are wondering about who are you marking that day and how did that go? Will they change things around? Will you be on different players? But ultimately, you’re thinking, it’s another opposition and how are you going to get over them.”
In a nutshell, the essential truth of every All-Ireland final and one that will have preoccupied Cork and Tipperary for the past fortnight.
