Darragh Ó Sé: Cork show what they can do when pushed

It gets harder and harder to know who to believe. Never mind that: it gets harder and harder to be believed, full stop. In the run-up to the Munster final, I was telling anybody who’d listen that Cork had a right chance. But sure nobody wanted to hear that sort of talk out of me.

Once my brother Tomás got his speak in first, everything that came out of the rest of our mouths was suspect. So when I ran into former Cork players like Nicholas Murphy in Killarney on Sunday morning, I couldn't put forward my theory that Cork had a shot without it being waved away as cute-hoorism.

You can’t blame them, I suppose. It is every Corkman’s right to be suspicious of anything that comes out of a Kerryman’s mouth at the best of times, doubly so on Munster final day. I ran into a Killarney hotelier afterwards who was trying his hardest to keep a straight face as he told everyone he met that a draw was a fair result. It was a fair result for him anyway.

So yeah, I can see why we’d struggle to be taken seriously. But I still say there was no way that game was going to be a cakewalk for Kerry on Sunday. People got far too carried away with how bad they thought Cork were. I know those guys from under-21 and colleges and from playing against some of the older ones. They’re no fools. You’re not going to keep putting them down without eventually getting a reaction.

You could see it in the unity they had with each other on Sunday. Little things: Donncha O'Connor rolled back the years and as he was taken off coming to the end of the game, he was straight over to Brian Cuthbert for a handshake. All the Cork players that came off did the same. This was a group of players who were sick, sore and tired of being told they were useless.

Never underestimate the power of getting a reputation for something you don’t think you deserve. It can drive you to distraction. We got it with Kerry when people started saying we couldn’t beat northern teams. In my head, I was always going: “But sure we’ve been beating northern teams since time began. There’s no reason for them to have a hold over us.”

But it was there and it stuck. It didn’t matter that we beat Armagh in 2000 and 2006; all anybody wanted to talk about was them beating us in 2002. And our record against Tyrone hung over us as well, to the point where people thought we had a complex about them.

We didn’t, in all honesty. Out of pure thickness, I wouldn’t allow it to bother me but you can’t account for everyone in a 30-man panel. There were more enlightened lads than me who might have worried about them alright. It really wasn’t something we talked about. Maybe we felt that if we talked about it in a group situation, we’d have been making more of a problem out of it than it actually was.

But there’s no doubt the perception that we did have an issue was something that drove us on. And all you had to do was look at Cork on Sunday and see that they were sick of all the chat about them. They were after taking a hosing from everyone in the run-up to the game and they decided that enough was enough.

Motivation

The worst of it probably came from their own people. Mick O’Dwyer used say that 31½ counties wanted to see Kerry beaten; that fraction after the 31 goes a good bit higher in Cork. If you were a Cork footballer watching the crowd that went over to Wexford to watch the hurlers on Saturday night and compared it to those in Killarney, wouldn’t you be in a rage? I would have thought a Munster final in Killarney would beat a qualifier in Wexford every time.

Put it all together and Cork had everything on their side in terms of motivation on Sunday. It fed into the perfect mindset for them: backs to the wall, sick of being the butt of all jokes, cranky and bulling for action.

The best way it was summed up for me was Alan O'Connor's performance. He was decent enough in the first half but he took over in the second. He built his performance as the game wore on, taking on momentum and self-belief each time he got involved. I was sitting beside Dermot Earley and we were riveted by what O'Connor was doing.

Of course, we’re two groany old retired midfielders now but this did the heart good. Midfielders have more or less been made redundant by the way the game is played now. Every team takes either short kick-outs or runs designed plays to hit wing-forwards dropping deep. The idea of a big man standing in the middle of the pitch and dictating the game is nearly from the dark ages.

Kerry’s midfielders kept switching wings to attack the Cork kick-out on Sunday, while O’Connor basically stood in the middle of the pitch with his two hands in the air telling Ken O’Halloran to kick it to him. No pointing, no running off the back of his man, just hands in the air to say: “Let it out here to me.”

I was watching the Kerry midfielders go over and back thinking they were complicating this thing far too much. There was one problem to solve and one way to solve it. O’Connor was bullying the Kerry midfield and he was going to keep doing it until somebody bullied him back. Nobody did and he owned them for the rest of the game.

This was one of the best displays of bullying and dominance that I have seen in a long time. In that second half when he was in the zone, I’d say he felt invincible. Any time he went out to midfield to get ready for a kick-out, he made sure he hopped off a Kerry player on the way. You could see that his mindset was exactly right: I’m here all day long, lads, and I have plenty of it for ye.

Earley was saying to me at one stage that he was a kind of an awkward player but I don’t see it like that. Awkward sort of implies that he doesn’t really have the use of himself or that it’s all a bit random. That’s not O’Connor at all. He’s tough and hard and clever. It all has a purpose. Where I thought Kerry failed on Sunday was not recognising how to deal with him.

A bully will get away with as much as he is let get away with. I was that soldier plenty of times. You have those days when you feel untouchable. You throw your weight around, pushing it as far as you can.

You might be going for a ball over near the sideline and even though it beats you and your marker across the line, you hop off him and put him on his ass. If the referee says anything, sure the ball was there you didn’t hear any whistle. You go back to your position but your man is wondering what was all that about and how you got away with it and what the hell the story is here.

Opportunity

And if somebody doesn’t come in to straighten you out, you’ll keep at it. O’Connor nailed

Donnchadh Walsh

with a shoulder into the chest on Sunday that just flattened him. Where were the other Kerry players? You can’t tolerate that sort of thing, especially since at that point, O’Connor was already running the game.

If you’re a Kerry player, that’s your spot to go and do a bit of sorting out. It’s a split-second opportunity but you have to take it. You have to turn the momentum of O’Connor’s afternoon around. The referee is already reaching for his card to book him so he’s not going to make a big deal of it if you go in and start tangling with him.

You’ll get a card yourself but what about it? It’s far more important that you let the bully know that this stops now. Instead O’Connor got his booking but went about his day unperturbed, leaving calling cards all over the place. He continued being the foil for all the players who could do the scoring.

Masterclass

I thought it was a masterclass. This was a guy who hadn’t played intercounty football for two years and here he was dictating how it was supposed to be. He was growing in stature all the time. Cuthbert took off Donncha O’Connor and

Brian Hurley

before the end but left O’Connor on the field. Why? Because he was in the zone and Kerry had no answer to him.

I would be a bit worried for Kerry on that performance. They look to me like a team that has done its training to peak for August, understandably enough. But the upshot of it is that they have a lot of heavy legs in the team at the moment and a lot of guys aren’t firing on full cylinders yet.

By far the easier route to the All-Ireland is by winning Munster, so the replay takes on huge importance. Kerry will still be a couple of weeks away from their peak when it comes around, and I think Cork are in a very strong position now.

That’s not cute-hoorism, genuinely.