Cork and Down produce fitting finale to Championship

A fine Championship summer got the send-off it deserved on a memorable day for the GAA, writes JOE’s Gaelic football analyst Ciaran Whelan.

 

In the words of Eamon Dunphy, Sunday’s All-Ireland final was a good game, not a great game. It was dogged, there was a fair bit of sloppy play on both sides. Still, it’s been a fantastic year for Gaelic football and it got the send-off it deserved, with the minor final producing a great game and the senior final going right to the wire.

It was a big day for the GAA. We’ve discussed the issue of pitch invasions here before and the measures that have been put in place worked well again on Sunday. After the final whistle you could see exactly what it meant to the Cork players, and you just don’t see that when thousands of people run onto the field as soon as the game is over. If that tradition can be changed for good – and hopefully it will, because getting high profile players like Sean Cavanagh and Marc O Sé involved is only going to help – then the GAA can jazz up the post-match even more and make that a huge part of the whole occasion.

As for the game, Cork were championship favourites before a ball was kicked but we’ve spent the summer wondering when they were going to step up and give the kind of performance they’re capable of, and we were still wondering at half-time. They were very poor in the first half. I expected them to learn a few lessons from the semi-final against Dublin but during the first 35 minutes it seemed that they didn’t learn anything. It was on the cards that Down would struggle against long direct balls in on top of them, and Cork could have had a couple of goals in the first few minutes using that tactic. After that, though, they reverted to type, with a lot of slow, lateral hand-passing. They were without direction, without structure, without cohesion. They looked clueless at times, with players like John Miskella and Alan O’Connor taking the wrong option and hitting bad wides.

In contrast, the Down forward line was moving well. It was well known that Marty Clarke and Benny Coulter would be their main two threats and Cork coped with them well enough, but Paul McCumiskey and Danny Hughes stepped up to the mark to share the scoring burden.

It’s a 20-man game nowadays and Cork’s 20-man effort was always likely to get the better of Down, who just didn’t have a whole lot of options off the bench.

Tactically, it was a surprise that Cork lined out with Noel O’Leary marking Marty Clarke. I expected Michael Shields to be given that job, and I expected Eoin Cadogan to have a man-marking job to do too, but that’s not the way it turned out. As it was, O’Leary clearly had a specific job to mark Clarke and over the 70 minutes he did a fine job of nullifying his influence, and Shields had a great game on Benny Coulter.

The last ten minutes of the first half was a key period, and Cork were able to get themselves out of a bit of a hole. After missing their early goal chances, it was 25 minutes before they got their first score from play, but they tagged on another one and managed to go in just three points behind. You sensed that if either team was going to find a good bit of improvement in the second half, it would be Cork, and that’s the way it turned out.

Their strength in depth in that second half was vital. While Down looked to be out on their feet after 55 minutes or so, Cork were able to bring three midfielders off the bench in the second half. Nicholas Murphy made a huge impact for 20 or 25 minutes, Derek Kavanagh came on when he got injured and Fintan Goold came in as a blood sub and won one good ball before the end.

Conor Counihan has been criticised for not starting with his strongest 15 but he’s usually finished with his strongest 15. Whatever way you look at it, it’s a 20-man game nowadays and Cork’s 20-man effort was always likely to get the better of Down, who just didn’t have a whole lot of options off the bench. Yes, Ronan Murtagh came in and got a point – although I felt he replaced the wrong man, as Paul McCumiskey had been playing very well – but they didn’t have the strength in depth elsewhere. With Ambrose Rogers injured and Dan Gordon relocated to full back, they were stretched thin in midfield, which was always going to be a key battleground.

Cork needed one or two of their forwards to really step forward in the second half and Daniel Goulding and Donnacha O’Connor did just that. Paul Kerrigan might not always have delivered the end product but his pace caused havoc when he ran at the Down defence. I thought Aidan Walsh, the only Cork midfielder to play the full game, had a great 70 minutes. He’s had a bit of a mixed bag all year but he’s still very young, he has been talked up a lot and we were expecting him to get better. Well, he got better yesterday, and he probably would have been my Man of the Match.

I was hugely impressed with Danny Hughes again on Sunday. He’s been so important to Down that I would have him in the running for the Footballer of the Year.

Overall, I felt Cork were deserving winners. They’ve been knocking on the door for a number of years and I’m delighted for them. Players like Nicholas Murphy and Graham Canty have been around a long time, and it’s great to see them finally win one.

Whether they can go on and win another one or two remains to be seen. It will have been a huge relief for them to get over the line and they have a conveyor belt of excellent U21s, but I’m not sure I’d compare them to the 1989 team, which lost a couple of finals and then won two in a row. In a way, I think this Cork team is more like the Dublin of ’95, who had lost finals and was then broken up. Will Nicholas Murphy be back? Will Graham Canty be able to go on after all the injuries he’s had? They’re a fine team and they well deserve this title, but as for talk of embarking on a period of dominance, I’m not so sure.

As for Down, they can be proud of their efforts year. Their brand of play has been a joy to watch and they’re a team with a big future. They should concentrate on giving Ulster a good rattle next year. So looking at Down as a whole, they’ll be strong at midfield with Ambrose Rogers coming back in and they have the forward line to match anybody. I’ve written about Danny Hughes here before and I was hugely impressed with him again on Sunday. He’s been so important to Down that I would have him in the running for Footballer of the Year honours.

They’ve looked a bit vulnerable in the backs and they’ll be trying to unearth a couple more players to shore that up. Marty Clarke wasn’t as influential as he might have liked on Sunday but he’s still a key player for them and he’s got better and better all year. If they can strengthen the defence a bit, and keep Clarke in this part of the world, then they can be very hopeful of going one better over the next year or two.

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I can’t finish off this week without saying a word about Micheál O Muircheartaigh. To me, the man is an absolute legend. What he means to the GAA was really brought home to me earlier this summer when I was out of the country for one of Dublin’s championship games. There were about 20 of us crowded round a phone listening to him, and he had everyone on the edge of their seats. I just feel sorry for whoever gets the job of following him, because he’s totally irreplaceable.

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