Cork must lose fear of the Park

The men in red are outsiders in Croke Park again despite their pre eminence in Munster against Kerry. Something has to give. Seán Moranreports.

CROKE PARK has been as treacherous a venue for favourites as for paper hats this month, but few of the underdogs have arrived on Jones's Road with the doleful record Cork footballers bring into tomorrow's All-Ireland football semi-final.

It will be the fifth meeting in seven years on the All-Ireland stage of provincial rivals Cork and Kerry - and a staggering 13th championship match in the same period - and so far despite being competitive and better in Munster, Cork have been present in body only for the Croke Park engagements, which have left them with an average margin of defeat in double digits.

Once again they take the field this weekend in the context of public weariness with the frequency and one-sidedness of the fixture and even the counties are emitting signals of at best indifference.

Maybe Waterford's cracking of the semi-final codes at the sixth attempt a week ago can inspire in Cork a belief that even the bleakest sequences have to end.

Sport psychologist Aidan Moran, professor of cognitive psychology at UCD, doesn't see Cork's poor record in these matches as a mental block.

"I'm of the view that tradition and the past is over-emphasised in the GAA. The more likely explanation is the reasons are not psychological but to do with other factors, such as venue, preparation or "periodisation" - how you space training. Kerry seem to get better and stronger as the season progresses. They do it better than any other team."

Looked at individually, how do these potential influences stack up? In Pure Sport - Practical Sport Psychology (Routledge, 2008), Moran and co-author John Kremer make this observation about the significance of venue: "Drawing all this research together it would appear that venue and crowd, home and away, can have a significant effect on performance and results, if they are not well managed."

At the same time from a performance perspective is it sensible to allow these factors to have an unregulated effect or would it be more prudent to prepare teams to play wherever they happen to be and to have in place routines that ensure what happens on the pitch is isolated from those factors . . .?

"What is meant by home is also interesting. Home may not be home at all, but the perception

of home . . ."

Croke Park has returned an 84 per cent success rate, 16 wins in 19 matches, for Kerry in the seven seasons under review so their attitude to the venue would have to be positive. From Cork's point of view, the stadium shouldn't be unmitigatedly forbidding. To reach the last four, as they have in five of the past seven years, they have had to win quarter-finals and last year added a semi-final to their list.

Ronan McCarthy, who played in the first Croke Park match between the counties, in 2002, doesn't buy into the venue as an influence.

"I wouldn't think so. Anyone who tells me that it's easier to play in Killarney than Croke Park has some convincing to do."

But viewed dispassionately the theory may have validity. Provincial venues Páirc Uí Chaoimh and Killarney are more familiar to the Cork players. The first one is their home and the second is the one away ground to which the county's supporters travel in large numbers.

Then there is preparation. As Moran notes, Kerry have become the best county at going up the gears as the summer progresses. Pat Flanagan, the county's physical trainer under Jack O'Connor's management, which yielded two All-Irelands in three years 2004-06, says that different routes in the final stages each had their merits.

"Win Munster, which we did the first two years, and you can up the training in the time available and that can be an advantage getting ready for the All-Ireland quarter-finals.

"Preparation in '06 (when the team had lost the Munster final to Cork) hadn't gone as well as we wanted. The reason we were stronger in August was because we'd tough games in the All-Ireland qualifiers and quarter-finals, which is fine once you don't pick up injuries."

Flanagan recalls the mood among players was a key element in the improvement. "Players were saying 'we can't lose to Cork at this stage'. When they needed to up it against Cork they were able to."

McCarthy remembers the semi-final of six years ago as catching Cork off guard with the recently introduced qualifier system being hard to get to grips with for the team.

"The first thing was we played them in a (provincial) semi-final and won the replay. It was a very strange feeling after the game: you hadn't won Munster and although you'd beaten Kerry they were still in the championship. The All-Ireland semi-final later that summer was the first time we'd met them outside of Munster.

"In Killarney it was Colm Cooper's first game and he was taken off, but by the time we played again he had four or five matches under his belt and was on the way to an All Star. We were sitting ducks in that semi-final because we'd never anticipated the intensity of their desire to beat us and the new system gave them that chance very quickly.

"I think they paid a price for that intensity, though, when they needed to dig deep in the final against Armagh."

As for the other matches that followed, he agrees with Moran. Depicting the grim record as some sort of complex just reflects, he believes, a desire to compartmentalise unrelated negative events.

"I don't think there's anything psychological about it. The media like to seize on things like that. When Kerry lost to Meath, Armagh and Tyrone one year after the next it was said they didn't have it to beat teams physically. No one says that now.

"As I said, we were sitting ducks in 2002 and in 2005 and '06 they were just better and would have been expected to beat us. Last year was disappointing. I never thought we were going to lose that heavily."

There's no doubting, however, the negative environment in which Cork approach the match. They are outsiders again despite a remarkable comeback in the second half of the Munster final. Bookies are quoting odds on another 10-point trimming.

For some, the challengers' best hope is the so far unresponsive law of averages. "People are saying Cork are going to win one at some stage," says Flanagan.

Moran doesn't see the challenge of halting the sequence as a sensible motivation.

"Everything we know tells us you have to clear players' minds of everything except the task in hand, get them to focus. When they start worrying about what's happened in the past it takes their minds off what they can do.

"Gaelic games can be particularly distracting. There are lots of other things going on, like representing your county and community as well as the past traditions. This leads to distraction and maybe panic when things are going badly."

That panic was certainly a contributory factor in the scale of Cork's defeats in Croke Park, particularly in last year's final when after a nervous opening from both sides it was they who made the crucial mistakes and then disintegrated in the face of the ensuing adversity.

But the burden of representation Moran cites can also be a motivation. Paul Galvin, Kerry's suspended captain, eloquently acknowledged as much after last September's final.

"I felt myself everything Kerry football stood for was on the line. Everything we'd achieved in the last four or five years, and everything we'd achieved in the last 100 years, was riding on that 70 minutes of football. It was that fear of losing to Cork that was driving us.

"The satisfaction for me comes from the medals. That's what it's all about. I just want to win as many medals as I can while I'm playing. But the fact that it was Cork out there meant defeat was not an option.

"I also knew there was no way I could let the people of Kerry down. That was very serious for us. We wouldn't have been let back into the county if we'd lost that game."

For Cork keeping the past at bay is one challenge; confronting the enduring reality of the present is another.