Magician in a team of hurling scientists

All-Ireland SHC Final/Cork v Kilkenny: Tom Humphries talks to Joe Deane, the attacking genius who has so often been for Cork the tipping point between losing and winning

Not too long ago the Cork hurlers were training in Páirc Uí Rinn when they became aware a familiar face was watching them. Roy Keane's razor features were surveying the scene. Afterwards the players went upstairs to eat. Keane was waiting there for them. He spoke and answered questions for about two hours.

"He brought something," says Joe Deane, "Especially in terms of his attitude. He said to get the best out of yourself when you can. Get rid of the distractions, they have nothing to do with it. He said he'd seen players who were more concerned about the money and the cars and the women (Deane pauses) - not that it happens with us anyway."

And questions for Keane? Deane looks surprised: "Just wondering about that ridiculous beard he was wearing."

The coolest man in hurling. Joe Deane. No discussion necessary. In the bad times Cork plucked him from the nursery and inserted him in their team. He was like a flicked switch. Instantly he was the light at the end of the long tunnel. Cork lost by 16 points to Limerick that day. Deane's radiance never dimmed though and he has started every championship game since. Eleven seasons of excellence and influence.

In a team whose intensity gives off a kiln's heat, Joe Deane is the one with the assassin's chilled blood in his veins. The turbulence of form, occasion or refereeing never seem to alter him. He lost a colleges All-Ireland with Midleton CBS the year before he turned senior for Cork. Kevin Broderick scored three goals that day for Loughrea CBS. Deane put three goals of his own down on the table. His job was done. The forensics people could look elsewhere. No discussion.

He's the cool one. In a team which views the world in hard diamond vision, in a side whose grounding in reality is such that they were born through a players' strike, in a group which has parsed the game and rebuilt themselves with the necessary pragmatism and ruthlessness Joe Deane is called Wizard. The magician among the scientists.

Wizard. Even on his bad days when Cork come to audit the accounts they find that he has been the tipping point between profit and loss. Take the last excursion, the one against Waterford, and fast-forward to that time when the game was balanced on a razor's edge. It was Deane who handed young Cathal Naughton a present of a pass which the young man had only to tear the wrapping from for his goal.

waterford was one of those days, just the fourth in 11 years when Deane has been shackled from play. It is noted and presented as a trend of slight significance that the other three occasions were his debut, when Cork lost by 16 points, and the last two All-Ireland finals. Add this to a rough day in 2003 on Noel Hickey and some prosecutors think they have a case.

The charge that the prairies of Croke Park aren't to Deane's taste doesn't really stick though. His contribution in the All-Ireland final of 1999, a first-half point and a late and crucial free from the limits of his range, were huge, especially given the conditions and the comparative youth of Jimmy Barry Murphy's boys.

In the final two years ago, Cork's first rousing declaration was an early chance when Deane scooted away and drove a goal chance against the crossbar. Last September he was busy again, his instinctive use of space and generous distribution setting up a good many of Cork's scores.

Even three years back when Hickey went all Torquemada and asked hard questions of Deane, the Corkman arrived at the gate of the All-Ireland with 4-9 from play to his credit. He had earned Hickey's full attention and by absorbing it he allowed Setanta Ó hAilpín to bloom in arid conditions.

Before the case is dismissed entirely, consider how many times you have sat in the stand in Croke Park and wondered when the hell they were going to haul Joe Deane off. The honest answer is never. His only substitutions in recent years have been in romps when he has made way late on to reward players who serve as training-field fodder.

The key is in Deane's intelligent adaptability. When he first went down to the club in Killeagh he gripped the hurley the wrong way around, left hand over right. Ray Rochford spent some time trying to make him switch, and for about a month Deane practised an orthodox grip. He didn't like it and went back to doing what he thought best for him.

As it was with the grip so it is with the hurleys. Adapt all the time. A few years ago Deane was using a 36-inch stick. He has come down two inches and still plays with a shortened grip anyway. He figured the sliotars were getting faster and the space was getting scarce. It all counts.

Adapt. Keep on moving. Deane is the small man who can take high ball and seems impervious to injury. Reared at centre forward, he can move in and out of full forward or either of the corner positions.

Learn. He may be implacable but his intelligence places him at the core of the Cork philosophy. Take the game he and his colleagues see as an eternal template for their endeavours: a big one in Croke Park, funny enough. Deane scored 10 points in the All-Ireland semi-final against Offaly back in the year 2000. Cork were All-Ireland champions then, the nascent greats of the game. Pat Ryan was midfield and had a way of finding Deane with quality low ball. Deane had four from play in the first half alone as Cork played happy hurling. The team had 10 feckless wides on their way to tea.

"Offaly were seen as a handy touch for a semi-final," he says. "All of a sudden in the second half we were three, four and five points down. We had so much ball but we were going for goals, going for goals. We have used that game as a learning tool all the time. If you get a chance put it over the bar. We have learned from our past experience, especially that day against Offaly."

Scoring goals was what he was reared on but today he banks the points. In Cork they compare his epic strike in the intermediate final of 1999 with JBM's effulgent moment against Galway in 1983. Today Deane would probably opt to palm the ball and take his point. Percentages.

Since they lost the 2003 final it has taken Cork 16 games to get to the cusp of this three-in-a-row. In 2003 Deane had a spike year for goals, scoring four (having just three championship goals in his career till then) but since then his record from play reads 2-25.

In a side which has evolved its scoring arms in a peculiar manner, it is Deane who has been top scorer in 10 of the last 11 summers. When the half-back line and the midfield are the acknowledged creative centres of the team and you are five feet seven inches tall, not a huge amount of tailored ball comes skittering low and hard into the land in front of your feet. Deane has coped.

In Killeagh they always knew it would be so. Deane is a distant relation of that other short-stick artist Seánie O'Leary but was raised in a household where the connection wasn't obsessed over and hurling wasn't fundamental. Deane's uncles played a little, his father not at all. Nothing was demanded.

"In the club in Killeagh you started when you went into the primary school. Fellas in the club came in and announced that there was going to be parish leagues on Wednesday nights. Every Wednesday. Somebody just came in and started it up and you went down and never thought about it. I wouldn't have been forced down but I loved it the minute I started it. Just played away."

Killeagh was, and is, a small club blessed with good mentors; the usual story for a country team. Deane played for the under-12s when he was eight, took a turn in goal for the under-21s when he was 16. The club was bringing in a few players from the age groups below all the time. Plenty of hurling if you wanted it. Little rituals.

Sonny McCarthy made the hurleys in Killeagh back then. You went down to Sonny and he'd give you your first stick for free. Set you on the road. You'd always try to cod Sonny that you needed a bigger stick . He'd give you a look at a couple and you'd be testing them out, throwing shapes and eyeing the bigger sticks.

He shone so quickly and brightly that they began bringing him to Cork games. Tommy Seward or Danno Kennedy or Ray Rochford. They'd pop him into the corner of a car with a bag of Tayto and a drink of orange and take him off to watch the gods at play.

As Danno Kennedy said to him the first time Deane was brought to Croke Park, "You're not hear to enjoy yourself, Joe, you're here to get used to the place."

He dabbled in football too and nobody thought it sinful. He has clear memories of being on the terrace in Páirc Uí Chaoimh with his father and uncle on the day Cork got a draw with Kerry in 1987. Larry Tompkins kicked a late free. It was the first change Cork had got out of Kerry in a long time.

Midleton CBS was an institution where they taught boys that hurling mattered, though. Brian Corcoran's 1988 Midleton team were still talked about in hushed tones when Deane arrived. The focus of his life had narrowed.

"Cork weren't going great in the late '80s, and by the time I went to secondary school my great hero was Joe Cooney. I played centre forward back then and he caught the hurley left over right. He was the free-taker and he was the guy they looked to. I wanted to be the same."

It wouldn't be long. JBM coached him at minor. And the following year, 1996, when JBM took the seniors he brought Deane in with him along with Mickey O'Connell, Donal Óg Cusack and Seán Óg Ó hAilpín.

There was a cohort of players there who had been playing together since being gathered on to Nicky Barry's under-14 Cork team a few years earlier. Derek Barrett and Timmy McCarthy were involved too. They were the future.

By 1999 they were the present: young champions ready to fill the blank pages of the coming championship seasons with their story. They fell apart. Losing to Galway in 2002 was an especial low point. Deane remembers the dressingroom that day in Semple Stadium. He remembers looking around at a lot of good hurlers and realising not enough of them cared.

When a strike was mooted later in the year he was cautious.

"I never saw it coming, to be honest, but Donal Óg had a huge influence. It hurt him a whole lot. We realised that everyone had to put their weight behind this. We were either going to be serious about it or throw our hats at it. Losing to Galway was an all-time low. It was the attitude, the not caring, the going down without a fight. If we had been beaten in the past we would have been throwing some shape. A lot of people seemed to feel, so what."

So they upped the ante for themselves. Deane became the front man for the strike, the perfect choice, detached and dispassionate yet very clear about what was needed.

"The toughest part was knowing that you are coming from a proud county like Cork. So many quality players played over a long number of years and we'll never reach their standards and they probably had the same to put up with as we had, worse even. And they'd never, ever given out about it.

"People would say, aren't ye sorted, aren't ye getting enough. That was the hardest part of it. Support from the general public was good. If they went against us we had no chance. There was dissent. It was hard to take. I got a few letters at the time. It was part of it but we got way more support. It's over and done with now.

"We never said afterwards that we had upped the ante but we knew ourselves. The main guys knew especially we were under pressure. If we didn't perform we'd be laughed at and slated for a long time to come. We grew from it, though. The strike wasn't everything but it was definitely a huge part."

Tomorrow Cork go looking for the last piece of their reward. Three-in-a-row is never spoken of but should it be achieved everything that preceded it will have been justified. Cork have become the model not just on the field but in how to treat and prepare a team.

Everything is close to perfect. Joe Deane a little closer than most.