When both All-Ireland men’s finals are played so close to each other, it’s only natural to try to take lessons from the first to bring into the second. But is that a very dangerous game to play if you’re Jack O’Connor or Jim McGuinness this week?
Neither man would be described as easily spooked (if you’ll allow me an understatement of that magnitude). They are not short of self-confidence. But what happened to Cork – and what has been said about Cork over the last 72 hours – is a pretty stark reminder of just how huge All-Ireland finals really are.
Pat Ryan made several crucial errors that may well have cost his team a chance to win the All-Ireland final last Sunday. That’s all it did – it cost the players a chance. The players still made the mistakes, they still played with the limpness and insipidness that we saw with our own eyes. Whether, with a different tactical set-up, they would have had the mental fortitude to finish the job is far from a settled question.
[ Anatomy of a collapse – how Cork managed to lose the second half by 3-14 to 0-2Opens in new window ]
But managers with less experience than McGuinness or O’Connor would be forgiven this week for panicking at the thought that they had forgotten something as basic as, “who is the free man if the game demands that we play with one”? It is the sort of error that would haunt any management team at any level, let alone one in an All-Ireland senior final.
“Let Mark Coleman be your free man.” Every Monday morning quarterback in the country was able to see it in retrospect. But to talk about “hindsight heroes” is to give the Cork management team a pass. Enough people were shouting about it after 10 minutes of the first half, let alone the second half.
That is the real killer. When Ryan and his selectors hear that Mark Coleman idea, what will hurt the most is that they’ll probably agree in their heart of hearts that it would have been the right thing to do. Either that, or there’s the alternative – saying you’d do again what you did on Sunday. Neither of those options is particularly palatable.
I couldn’t imagine being a coach preparing for a first All-Ireland final and sitting down to watch that Cork performance seven days before you lead a team out in the biggest game of your life, feeling the second-hand panic at the idea you might miss something so likely to happen.
“Just relax ... we’ve thought of everything. Haven’t we? We have. We definitely have.” “Have you?”
But there’s another lesson that might be just as important to learn, one with a more positive spin. Maybe to win a final, you have to bring something different. Maybe, instead of leaning into the idea that a final is just another game, you instead internalise the idea that finals are different and require a different mindset.
Tipperary may have become the first team to win an All-Ireland final playing a sweeper, but they hadn’t played one all season. They brought something to the biggest day that their opponents – obviously – didn’t expect. You can say Cork had plenty of time to react to this curveball, but Tipp asked them the question.
Having conceded seven goals in the All-Ireland semi-final, Dublin manager Niall Ó Ceallacháin said that playing a sweeper would lose you the game – “with the alternative, you won’t lose by 20 points like what we lost there. But you will lose the game.”
Liam Cahill wasn’t too sure, but he was pretty sure that leaving his full-back line man-on-man on that Cork full-forward line without any cover was not a great option either.
Don’t let the obvious thing beat you. That was the gamble Cahill took.
The obvious way to be beaten by Kerry is David Clifford. In a way, allowing Seán O’Shea to kick 12 points against you still makes more sense than taking your eye off Clifford even for a moment. O’Shea did it once this season, against Armagh – can he do it again?
Finals are different. When we look at Michael Murphy’s role for Donegal, we’ll see that the only time that Donegal really tried to find him on the edge of the square for a sustained period of the game was in the first half against Armagh in the Ulster final. It hasn’t been seen since. But we all remember 2012 and the first ball he received against Mayo in that All-Ireland final.
[ A Kerry v Donegal All-Ireland final isn’t the clash of styles you think it isOpens in new window ]
Maybe what Donegal have in store for Kerry has echoes of what we’ve seen in those finals (Ulster and All-Ireland) spanning 13 years. It would make a degree of sense, as Kerry don’t really have anyone who matches up physically to him. I’d fancy Jason Foley in a sprint against him. But under a dropping ball, with Murphy in position and the right delivery coming in? That’s a rather different proposition.
Of course, neither manager is in Liam Cahill’s position either. Kerry and Donegal have seasoned managers, seasoned leaders, and a bank of work this season that says they have ticked all the boxes a team needs to tick to win an All-Ireland (short of winning the final).
Tipp played with the freedom that their manager obviously felt. Cahill could try things because he had to try things. Neither Kerry nor Donegal have that advantage. Time to stick or twist.
