Cork face a unique challenge on Sunday. They are going into an All-Ireland semi-final knowing the only thing that stands between them and the final is a team they've already beaten. Eight weeks ago, they stormed into Thurles and ruined Waterford's day with a great performance. But now they have to do it again or their season will have been ultimately unsatisfying.
The mental challenge here is really tough. In 2013, Cork beat Clare in Munster but lost the All-Ireland final to the same team after a replay. The drawn game that day came down to tiny margins and the replay was the Shane O’Donnell show. Ultimately, the Clare challenge in September was different to what it had been in June and Cork weren’t able to rise to it accordingly.
So now they face Waterford again.
There are dangers everywhere in the build-up to this one. For the younger lads, this will be their first time playing a championship match in Croke Park. For some of the older ones, like Mark Ellis, Damien Cahalane, Alan Cadogan and Bill Cooper, they've never won a game there. Even without going near the idea of having to play a team they've already beaten, there are loads of mental boxes to be ticked before Sunday.
You can't win an All-Ireland in the week of a game but you can most certainly lose it
I’ve been on both sides of this coin. In 2015, Kilkenny played Galway in the All-Ireland final having beaten them in the Leinster final earlier in the summer. For the first half of that final we fell into what you’d think would be a fairly obvious trap – we had a small bit of complacency and it killed us.
We obviously felt we had Galway’s number because we had beaten them in probably 80 per cent of the matches we’d played against them over the years.
We had won the Leinster final by eight points – the day Joe Canning got his wonder-goal on the turn down at the Hill 16 end of Croke Park. But no matter how we tried to guard against it, we obviously still had it somewhere in our heads that we'd come through the All-Ireland final okay.
We were three points behind at half-time and there were some loud voices and strong characters laying down the law in the dressing room that day. And to be brutally honest about it, if we had been up against a team that was mentally stronger than that Galway team, it would have been too late for us in the second half. But back then, Galway had a little chink in their psychology when it came to Kilkenny. They have clearly turned a corner and they don’t have it anymore but it was a problem for them then.
Same trap
Cork could very easily fall into the same trap, albeit for different reasons. They have a back-and-forth relationship with Waterford, with neither of them having the upper hand at any stage.
But you have to remember, Cork are coming in here on the crest of a wave. Cork hurling has been on a high all summer. The under-17s won their All-Ireland last Sunday. The minors are in the semi-final as the curtain-raiser. Everything is positive, positive, positive. You can easily lose your focus.
Brian Cody used to drill into us the idea of focus around this time of year.
“You can’t win an All-Ireland in the week of a game but you can most certainly lose it,” he’d say.
His point was that these are the weeks when there’s way more razzmatazz, way more interest from the outside. When you’re in a county panel, you’re cut off from the outside world most of the time. And, to be perfectly honest, the outside world isn’t that interested in you most of the time either. Except around now. Focus is everything.
It takes a very strong management team and a very hungry, ambitious core group of leaders within the panel to protect that level of focus. The leaders need to be around the younger players in particular this week to ensure it doesn’t slip. They set the tone and the environment for other players to experience that tunnel vision.
As soon as Cork came back together after their Munster final win, that environment should have been set. As soon as Waterford qualified, the panel should have zoomed completely in on them. Nothing else matters – work, job, family, everything. It all goes into being 100 per cent mentally and physically ready for Cork to be the best version of themselves.
The first sign of complacency or taking your eye off the ball needs to be nailed, whether it’s a player, county board official, backroom team member, whoever. Don’t assume anything. Make sure every last detail is done. Every day, every ball, every training session, every recovery session, all done correctly.
The upside of playing a team you have beaten before is that you have 70 minutes of concrete experience to draw from. The downside is that you could very easily overanalyse what happened the first day.
Because of their style of play and the way they set up, Waterford force you into a volume of video analysis that goes above the norm anyway. Management, players, stats teams – everyone has probably been through the video from the game in June a heap of times by now.
In Kilkenny, we used an app called Hudl. You could log in and filter video clips by individual, filter it by team, whatever you wanted. If your training sessions were filmed, you could go through them. You could watch your own highlights, get into the real nitty-gritty of anyone’s game.
Video clips
I never got too lost down the rabbit hole with the video clips but if I was detailed to man-mark somebody specifically, I would study his highlights on the Hudl app. What side does he want the ball on? When does he make his run? Does he jink one way and go the other? Does he have positions on the field that he shoots from automatically? When does he turn back inside? What does he not like to do?
I don’t know this for sure but I would imagine that with younger guys, there is a danger they could get too caught up in going through video clips on their phone. Any lad in his 20s these days is absolutely handcuffed to his phone anyway and I could just see them sitting at home at night this week, hitting clip after clip and overloading on information.
The one thing Cork don’t want to lose is the lovely freedom of expression that has been the hallmark of their hurling so far this summer. You don’t want paralysis by analysis to take the edges off them. Fill them with too much information and they might start worrying about the opposition too much and forget to play their own game. Another thing for management to keep an eye on.
From Waterford’s point of view, this is not a bad position to be in at all. It’s a mental challenge for them too, of course. But there’s a big difference between having to mentally guard against something that might happen and using something that has happened for motivation.
I never liked leaning on revenge for motivation but it’s very hard not to. My ideal attitude was always: “We’re doing this for ourselves as a team, it doesn’t matter who we’re playing.”
But occasionally, when I felt we owed a team for a defeat, whether it was in a previous game that summer or for an All-Ireland the year before, that small little pinprick of revenge would be there giving me a jab to try and get my attention.
My instinct was to try to keep it out of there and to try to be cold-blooded and analytical about the whole thing. But after a while, I remember saying, “You know what? Let it in”. Because revenge is good. Revenge is hurt. Revenge motivates you, pushes you to find that extra couple of per cent. And as I got older, I decided not to look at it as revenge but rather just another reason to push myself a little bit harder.
So it does give you that bit of impetus if you look at it the right way and Waterford will have that in the build-up to this weekend. It’s not actually revenge against Cork. It’s revenge against yourself and the way you let yourself down the first day. Waterford probably feel they put all their eggs in the championship basket and then didn’t live up to what they said they would do. That’s what they will want to avenge, far more than anything Cork did on the day.
Different man
That's why I think from a mental point of view, you'd rather be coming in here in Waterford's position rather than Cork's. So the question is, how do Cork handle it? Now, more than ever, the onus is on their leaders to carry this for them. For this weekend and onwards to the final, they need the likes of Anthony Nash and Mark Ellis and Conor Lehane to be pushing everything.
They need to be like “Playoff” LeBron. Rarely in any sport do opposing teams come up against each other as much as in the NBA playoffs. Two teams play the best of seven games to progress through each round First Round, Conference Semis, Conference Final and NBA Final. That’s a potential 28 games in the play-offs alone after a regular season. These guys could have beaten each other three times already but they have to do it again in a Game Seven. How?
Players from the Cleveland Cavaliers said LeBron James became a different man in the playoffs last year. Even after one of his best overall regular seasons, he just found another level. Playoff LeBron became a hash-tag. Opposing coaches spoke after games of how he’d taken it up a notch. One team-mate told a story of how LeBron played 38 minutes of a hard game one night and when everyone else arrived to the gym the next morning, he was already there with a full sweat on. “The playoffs are coming, man,” he said.
I remember reading that and thinking of Henry Shefflin. Different sport, different circumstances, different universe. But the same thing in terms of leadership. Always around this time of year, we would arrive at training in Nowlan Park and Henry would have been there before us practising frees. You'd go out onto the pitch to start pucking around and he'd already have a sheen of sweat on him.
On a very simple, basic level, I would look at that and go: “Right, there’s our leader and our best player and he’s finding another level when it matters. What excuse could I possibly have for not pushing on and trying to find another one myself?” Leadership like that sends out massive waves through a squad and bit by bit, player by player, it all adds up.
From watching them this summer, I get the feeling Cork have those kind of leaders now. You wouldn’t have said it about them in the past but just the way they’re coaxing their younger players through games, taking responsibility and driving on, they look mentally stronger than before.
I’ll give them a hesitant nod for Sunday on that basis.
