Cork's winning habit in Thurles

Despite having been a force in senior hurling for 20 years, Offaly have had few dealings with the traditional powers outside of Leinster in the championship. They have never played Tipperary in the All-Ireland and Sunday will be only their second meeting with Cork.

The first was an historic All-Ireland final 15 years ago, the centenary of the GAA - an anniversary marked by the staging of the hurling final in Thurles where the association had been founded in 1884. It ended in a calamitous defeat for Offaly, who were devastated by a third-quarter scoring blitz and ended up losing by 10 points.

That year's All-Ireland was a symbolic meeting of old and new hurling powers. Offaly had won the county's first championship in 1981 whereas Cork were then, as now, top of the roll of honour. As an added twist, Offaly were hot favourites after an impressive run to the final whereas Cork had lost the previous two All-Ireland finals to Kilkenny.

"Up to the final, it was Offaly's best championship," explains Diarmuid Healy, who was managing them that year. "We had beaten Galway convincingly in the semi-final and were favourites going into the final. It was solid crazy. Offaly who had won their first All-Ireland only three years before were hot favourites against Cork with twenty-something All-Irelands."

There was an added pressure on the Leinster champions. Apart from the stress-free demolition of Galway in the semi-final, they had not played a championship match outside of Croke Park.

"It wasn't a major thing but we would have regarded Croke Park as a home venue," says Healy. "Players would have been happy in their regular surroundings. But the big thing was being favourites. Offaly people said `what are you worried about?'

"I tried to counteract by bringing in the players one night and working them hard and playing a challenge the next night. In 1981, I brought up Clare and we only beat them by a point. People watching went home saying `that crowd will win nothing'. It lowered expectations and stopped complacency setting in.

"But in 1984, I had the players stiff from training when I asked Westmeath up for a match. They didn't have a full team when they arrived so we ended up walloping them - which only reinforced the problems."

Cork's joint-manager (with Justin McCarthy) Canon Michael O'Brien agrees with Healy that the venue shouldn't exercise too much of an influence on teams but allows that Semple Stadium was as much a favourite ground to Cork as Croke Park was to Offaly.

"Cork people would say that Thurles is a very special place and that Cork teams always seem to play very well there but I don't think teams should be depending on things like the pitch. Players can allow those things to get to them.

"Even for Sunday, some people are saying that Croke Park is alien to Cork but I would expect players at that level to rise above that as a consideration. A lot of All-Irelands have been won in Croke Park by Cork teams."

He also accepts that being outsiders was beneficial for the team. "It was a great advantage not to have the public working out the mathematics of the whole thing."

There was an electric atmosphere around Thurles on the weekend and that posed problems for the teams. Healy says Offaly found it difficult to concentrate amidst the carnival while Cork had devised their own solution to the problem.

"There was a lot of hullabaloo around the hotel and it was impossible to get any privacy. Michael O'Brien was the Cork manager and he knew the local nuns and they stayed in the convent," says Healy.

The Cork manager had worked out that there would be no escape from the public gaze in any of the hotels and although Cork teams normally went to the Anner Hotel in the town, he determined that the team's whereabouts would be secret.

"It was decided that going into Thurles wouldn't be a great idea. The town wasn't large enough for us to find peace and quiet in a hotel so we went up on the Sunday morning and stayed in the Ursuline convent. This was on the condition that the nuns wouldn't let anyone in and that it wasn't even to be known that we were staying there.

"Nobody knew where we were. Derry Gowan, the county chairman, must have had a suspicion because he went up to the convent and asked were the Cork hurlers staying there. The nuns were under strict instructions not to tell so the sister who answered said: `I beg your pardon!' and Derry just said, `oh, I'm sorry sister' and left. So she didn't have to tell a lie about it.

"Later a helicopter passed overhead and Jimmy Barry-Murphy pointed up and said: `Look up there, Derry Gowan's still looking for us'."

The team undertook to return to the convent the following morning for Mass and fulfilled the promise although on the Sunday evening, their manager was in pragmatic mood. "I said to John Fenton (the Cork captain): `maybe we should go up to the convent now. Things might be a bit messy by the morning.' But he said, `no, Father, we said we'd be there in the morning and we will'. And they were."