When you’re sitting high on the mountain, everything below you looks perfect and orderly and exactly as it was meant to be. Tipperary are All-Ireland champions and so they get to frame what just happened. That Cork goal right on the stroke of half-time? “I think it woke us up,” said Mikey Breen.
“We kind of planned for that,” said Darragh McCarthy. “We said during the week if we are five or six points down, we are not going to panic. We know what we are capable of. We have come back from worse margins before.”
Okay, maybe. But whatever anyone saw happening at half-time, they didn’t see this.
The headline numbers tell you that Cork lost the second half by 3-14 to 0-2. Drill down a bit further and reality is even more miserable. On top of their two points, they only had 10 more shots in the entire half. They had five wides, hit the post three times, pinged the crossbar once and Conor Lehane saw his penalty saved at the end. Twelve shots in a half. Unheard of.
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So what happened? How could a Cork team that had been stitching such gaudy totals together all year suddenly find their works gummed up to such an extent that they would only manage a dozen shots in 39 minutes of hurling? Let’s break it down.
It started with a miss. Cork won a free straight from the second-half throw-in and Patrick Horgan lined it up. In the great man’s long Cork career, he has stood over hundreds of shots that were more taxing than this one but it sailed close to the right-hand post and Hawkeye called it wide.
If Horgan had landed that, Cork were seven ahead. Instead, Tipp reeled off the next five points in a row. Conor Stakelum, a couple from Andy Ormond, two from Darragh McCarthy (one from play, one a free) – Tipp were snapping into everything now. The shots they had been missing in a first half in which they’d hit nine wides were all splitting the posts. Cork were creaking.
“We were six points up at half-time and in a really, really good position,” said Pat Ryan afterwards. “But when we came out, they got momentum behind them and we just couldn’t wrestle it away. Then there was the John McGrath break off Patrick [Collins] and obviously the penalty. We had an opportunity to go seven points up with Patrick’s free just after half-time and all of a sudden then you were chasing the game and you were seven or eight points down in the blink of an eye.”
It took a shade over 16 minutes, to be precise. Tipp went from six down at half-time to six up in the 51st minute. McGrath’s first goal was lucky in a way and not at all lucky in another.
Patrick Collins preventing a point by sticking up his hurley meant the ball fell beautifully to him. But it wasn’t just a case of dispatching it to the net – McGrath’s composure in tapping the ball into space to pick up and tip into the corner was all his years made flesh.
That goal put Tipperary ahead for the first time in the match. It felt significant – they didn’t lead at all in the ill-fated Darragh McCarthy match in Munster and only poked their noses ahead for a brief few seconds in the league final. Now, they weren’t just alive and kicking in the All-Ireland final, as their most optimistic followers had hoped. They were ahead.
And Cork were scrambling. Shane Barrett popped up with their first point of the second half, 12 minutes after the restart. Séamus Harnedy came off the bench and struck a wide. Brian Hayes, shackled so earnestly by Ronan Maher all day, tried one falling back on the Cusack Stand side and it went wide too. The gap was only two points but it was starting to feel like more.
Soon it was more. McCarthy was steady as rent all day with his frees and now, as the stadium was positively supersonic in the aftermath of the penalty award against Eoin Downey, the 19-year-old corner forward stood with the ball in his hand, tapping it to himself. A couple of the Cork players came over for a word, only for Ronan Maher to scamper a good 50 yards up the pitch to play bouncer. McCarthy shrugged regardless, stepped up and buried it.
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That was that. Incredibly, everyone in the ground could see that Cork were done. They had been outscored by 2-7 to 0-1 and though there were a good 20 minutes left, it was clear that their heads had gone. All the clever stickwork and snappy passing that had filled the highlights reels in the build-up to the final, it all fell to pieces now.
“They had the momentum and we didn’t use the ball well enough,” said Ryan. “I think we probably played a bit more as individuals. That’s something we spoke about, trying to make sure that when things go against you, that you keep playing as a team, keep sticking to the process and keep sticking to what we want to do.
“Those half balls inside and taking that extra pass, we didn’t do it. As someone said there, I think we had three balls off the post where we could have carried those balls in and made sure of those scores. Look, at the end of the day, it’s hard to find bits and pieces when Tipperary just blew us away in the second half.”
Blew them away, blew them to pieces. Putting them all back together again will be some job of work for Cork in the months ahead.
