February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
They went in for their half-time group therapy session last Sunday trailing Clare by 1-11 to 0-6. One of the great truisms in hurling is that, unlike football, an eight-point lead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But still, over a team that only scored six points in the first half, nobody could see how it wouldn’t be enough. You only generally get one miracle bound out of the grave a year and Cork had surely used theirs up against Galway the previous Saturday.
But no. From somewhere – and only they know where – they fashioned another scarcely believable comeback. They won the second half 2-13 to 1-6 against a Clare team that didn’t even do them the favour of lying down and letting them at it. Bit by little bit, they nipped and tucked their way back into the game, cutting Clare’s lead to seven points, five points, two points and taking it up themselves for the first time with 10 minutes to go. They even survived a Clare rally – there was nothing in it with five left on the clock – and in the end, two Neil Ronan points in the closing minutes sealed it for them. They got themselves back into it through heart and passion and, once there, won as if from muscle memory.
“The players just can’t do it easy,” Cork manager Gerald McCarthy said afterwards. “We didn’t play in the first half, quite obviously. We were a little worried about how the lads would react to the hard game we had last Saturday, they had so little time to recover. And we didn’t hit the ground running. We weren’t winning the breaks – Clare absolutely cleaned us out on the breaks in the first-half. It looked like our legs were heavy, that we just weren’t reacting to breaking ball. We tried to lift them, and they came out very strong at the start of the second-half, and we got a goal, which was very important.”
Now it’s Kilkenny in a fortnight and, although you couldn’t with any degree of confidence give Cork much a of chance, we’ve thought that twice in the past fortnight, been sure of it both times, and ended up hopelessly and joyously wrong. “It was one of the great days in Thurles,” said Clare manager Mike McNamara. “I’m not sure how you saw it but I think it was one of the greatest games of hurling it has been my privilege to see.”
Nobody was arguing with him on that score.