Cats only competing with their own potential

SIDELINE CUT:As for Cork, yesterday's defeat leaves no room for self-deception, no breathing space for the status quo at administrative level, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

WITHIN MINUTES of each other, Brian Cody and Denis Walsh came to the dull little theatre where managers and willing players are debriefed in Croke Park after games. We recorded their words but studied their body language.

The press conference room has no natural light – and that applies to the exchanges as well as to the architecture. Anybody who comes in has enjoyed quite some time to compose themselves and rediscover the mastery of cliché which deserted them in the heady minutes after the final whistle.

These are dull affairs. We miss being able to convey that fresh excitement but barriers seem to be the GAA’s way of rediscovering the past right now.

The press conferences were bland and short but even so it was remarkable how little difference there was in the demeanour of the two managers. Cody’s team has become (though he would never say it himself) an expression of his personality. All passion and all eloquence are reserved for the field. When Cody comes to talk there is seldom anything left to be said.

And for Walsh yesterday there was nothing to say. Cork were beaten so comprehensively hindsight and rationalisation and analysis were redundant when the whistle blew. They were beaten in a way that almost extinguished all hope. It was hard to know what hurt the most. The sure knowledge that if Kilkenny had kept their foot to the metal the margin would have been twice as great, or the knowledge Kilkenny didn’t feel the need to do that. Nothing hurts worse than unrequited enmity.

One suspects that in the Kilkenny camp there was quiet irritation last week when Nickey Brennan put on a cheerleading skirt, unbecoming for a former Uachtarán, and poor Eddie Keher took to the old Ayatollah trick of denouncing books he’s never read. Kilkenny are above such silliness.

(Of course, media abhors a vacuum and the vacuum left in the run-up to Kilkenny games is considerable. Nobody talks and nobody is even wholehearted in the business of analysis. When each new set of victims go over the top out of the trenches to get mowed down mercilessly it is fatuous to be advising on what tactics might be used to stay alive for longer.)

It suited the shorthand of big games and old-style hype to let Nickey and Eddie bumble off to the space between inverted commas and so to depict this game as the final instalment of a long and epic struggle between two sides who grew up together as rivals. Stepfords versus Rebels. Or whatever.

In reality that narrative was finished long ago and what went down yesterday was no more special or satisfying for Kilkenny than beating Dublin or Galway this summer.

Every serious team has spoken about this dream in dressingrooms and meetings down through the decades but Kilkenny have done it, they have arrived in that perfect place where their motivation is derived from their own desire for self-fulfilment and self-actualisation.

They gave up long ago on primitive japes like tacking bits of newsprint to dressingroom doors and whispering into each other’s ears about rumours of disrespect from distant counties.

They aren’t measuring themselves against anybody else anymore, they are competing with their own potential, looking to drain every drop before age catches them. They are striving to do something which so few humans ever get to do, they are looking to do one meaningful thing perfectly, to look back and say they gave hurling everything they had and became the best they could and there are the results. In life such chances are rare and fleeting.

As such, their progress is something majestic and wondrous to behold.

What hurts Cork and what those who took reactionary positions on the business of their strikes refuse to even contemplate is Kilkenny’s journey was one which Cork hoped to make themselves. They would love to have explored the far reaches of their own great souls in the same way.

They may not have become the greatest team of the last decade but they remain the most interesting. Looking at them yesterday, fighting till the end but hopelessly outgunned, it was hard to remember the character of this Cork team has it root traces in the minor All-Ireland wins of 1995 and 1998, games in which they beat Kilkenny by 17 points and nine points respectively.

They graduated prematurely on that wet September day in 1999, beating Kilkenny again.

It’s an old story now but not long afterwards Kilkenny went about putting in place the structures which have brought the county to this time of plenty.

Ned Quinn and the Kilkenny board had the humility to go away and examine everything they were doing. Old hurlers were prised out of ditches and put out on to training fields to invest and inculcate and pass it on.

In Cork, most old hurlers remained too afraid of not getting All-Ireland tickets to raise their voices in query against the winds of neglect.

Since 1999, Cork have one a single minor All-Ireland title, while Kilkenny have three and only Armageddon will stop this year’s fine team winning another next month. That period has brought them nine Leinster minors and five All-Ireland under-21 titles, plus two losing appearances in finals. Cork haven’t even reached an under-21 final.

All that and St Kieran’s are back on top of the pile at schools level. It’s been eight years since a title at that level went to Cork.

What the Cork players suffered yesterday was the last toxic spasm of the failed regime that is their county board, a gerontocracy whose imperial hubris has rotted a great hurling county from within. The arrogant belief that Cork are Cork and nothing else is needed has been laid bare. The crumbling state of Páirc Uí Chaoimh and the decrepit state of the county’s hurling structures insult the history the Cork board had guardianship off.

So it was left, as usual, to the players, men who wanted better and demanded better, to carry the can in terms of derision and antipathy yesterday.

They bore the burden yet again yesterday for years of official neglect.

It is good for Cork yesterday’s defeat leaves no room for self-deception, no breathing space for the status quo at administrative level. If the bravery of this remarkable team had closed the gap to single figures, grey men in grey suits might have kept their palsied fingers on the levers for another while.

Cork are gone for a while. While other counties give chase to Kilkenny it will be the Rebels’ fate to watch and to know that half a decade’s worth of rebuilding lies ahead of them, that is if they can find administrators enlightened enough to supervise that.

Kilkenny were (and it is a term devalued by overuse) awesome yesterday. They have become the perfect hurling team, perhaps the perfect team. Nothing derails them or distracts them.

Rather than hope their empire will soon crumble through decadence or loss of hunger we should wish they keep pushing on and demanding more not just from themselves but from any team which wants to live with them.

Cork as a house of hurling has been humiliated and laid low and must start again.

In that respect the excellence of their erstwhile rivals has done them a significant favour.