It’s entirely possible that the Cork hurlers will not win the All-Ireland. Just saying, like.
This is not meant as an insult, nor even just to tweak the proud Cork noses as they head for Croke Park this weekend. It just seems like a good time to point out that there is a world in which 2025 ends in the same way as every one of the past 20 seasons have. That is to say, with somebody other than a Cork captain singing and bucklepping on the steps of the Hogan Stand.
We are at the point of peak Cork giddiness. Everyone – or at any rate, everyone outside the Dublin dressingroom – assumes that this weekend is a straightforward tick of a box. Cork didn’t come this far to lose to Dublin, for the love of Ring. Check the Irish Rail website – the Cork-Heuston trains on All-Ireland final day are already sold out.
So now, right now, this is when all is for the best in this best of all possible Cork worlds. They’re odds-on favourites for the All-Ireland heading into the last four. This has to be a unique occurrence for a team looking to end a famine, or very close to it.
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It can’t have happened too many times before that a county who hasn’t lifted Liam MacCarthy in such a long time are odds-on shots before they’ve even played the All-Ireland semi-final. Who would even be the candidates for a list like that?
Limerick in 1994? Clare in ’95? No way. Maybe, at a push, Limerick in ’96. They had Antrim in the semi-final and would have felt they had little to fear from Galway and Wexford on the other side of the draw. They were probably favourites before the semi-finals but they wouldn’t have been 4-5 shots, surely. A bookie would do slim business at that price.
So we’re in new territory here. And yet, it somehow feels like old territory too. Cork, Tipperary and Kilkenny filling three of the four spots in the All-Ireland semi-finals, the blue bloods reasserting their command over the old game. Stick your revolution, lads. The empire is striking back.
Now, not to jinx it or anything, but Cork have never won Liam MacCarthy when all three have still been involved at this point. This is the sixth time it’s happened, since you ask. Kilkenny have won four of the other five, Tipp did it in 2010. In fact, Cork have only once made it to the final in these circumstances.
That’s why this is such a golden moment for all the Rebels pouring into the capital this weekend, their spirits high and their voices higher. Rightly or wrongly, there are no nerves to deal with here. If Dublin turn them over, it will be an immediate apocalypse, a sudden and brutal cardiac shock. But it’s the kind of thing they can’t feel worried about until they’re stuck in the middle of it.
If they win through to the final, that’s when the nerves will start to infest and to spread. Cork hurling supporters are bullish but they are not bulletproof. They will feel they’re better than Tipp and better than Kilkenny too but they won’t be able to truly trust it. A fortnight is a long time to think about all the ways you can crash and burn, especially when you’ve crashed and burned in the past four finals you’ve been to.
But that’s a worry for Monday and beyond. In the here and now, we get to observe the Cork hurling albatross with its wings at full span. Watch it swoop upon Dublin city, haughty and noble and unstoppable, picking off the bits it fancies as it goes. Eating the best food the capital has to offer, drinking its porter, still full sure that the English Market and the Hi-B are superior.
And quite right too. The gathering speed of the Cork hurling bandwagon has been one of the beautiful miracles of Irish sport over the past decade or so. Nobody had ever sold out an All-Ireland hurling semi-final until last year and now they’re about to do it again. And not against Limerick or Clare or Wexford or any of the other mad-bastard support bases. Against Dublin, who didn’t even fill Parnell Park for their Leinster matches.
This will be Cork’s eighth championship sell-out in a row. For any GAA team to do that is a wild achievement at a time when ticket prices have never been as high and when the cost of living is through the roof. For Cork to do it while not even winning an All-Ireland (yet?) is bananas.
Yes, fine, Cork people love their hurling. But they didn’t just start loving it in the past couple of years. It’s easy to forget that they didn’t even make it out of Munster in 2023. This is the perfect storm of a likable team, a manager of obvious decency and humanity, a starving fan base, a much-dumped-upon stadium and a county board that is finally looking outward after decades of insularity.
It has grown organically, gradually, Corkily. And now it’s gathering speed. They’re hurtling through that twilight zone where people think of them as the best team in the country without them actually having done the thing yet. Most presume they will. But they might not.
It’s a precarious, delicious, excruciating position to be in. You’d feel for the hoors, if you didn’t know better.
