It seems like every year, Waterford get to round three of the round robin with their season on the line. By this stage, they have never had more than three points. This time, they have one point on the board and their next two games are against the second favourites for the All-Ireland and the favourites. Their first two games were against the last two All-Ireland champions. Munster is brutal.
It’s impossible to know where they stand. Against Clare, they were nine points down. Against Tipperary, they were 11 points behind. They could easily have received a bad beating both days. Instead, they hung in there. They scored a staggering 2-17 against Tipp in the second half, which amounts to the same score (3-14) Tipp got against Cork in the second half of last year’s All-Ireland final. Everyone said what Tipp did was sensational.
Waterford are capable of scoring in bursts and putting it up to all the top teams, but they’ve also taken some heavy defeats in Munster in recent years and you never know what you’re going to get from them.
Hurling is more structured now than ever before, but Waterford are still inclined to play off the cuff. They’re a bit old-school in that way. Sometimes that’s great to watch and sometimes you’d be pulling your hair out watching them.
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Against Tipp, they had some crazy wides and made some bad decisions in possession. If they had been smarter with the ball, they could have ended up beating Tipp, no matter how unlikely that looked at half-time.
The problem that Waterford have every year is finding the confidence to do something they haven’t done before. This is the seventh year of the round-robin format and as they keep being told, they haven’t qualified yet.
Since they reached the All-Ireland final in 2017, the only good seasons they’ve had were during the pandemic when the championship went back to a back-door system. During those couple of years, they were probably Limerick’s biggest rivals.
The match-ups will be interesting. Without Rob Downey and Ciarán Joyce, Cork are missing two of the pillars of their defence. Full back has been a problem for Cork for many years, but it looked like Joyce was going to give them some stability in that position. Without him, Cork will need to go back to somebody they’ve tried before and wasn’t quite good enough, for whatever reason.
Eoin Downey spent two seasons at full back, but the first one was better than the second. His brother Rob played there in the 2021 All-Ireland final, but it’s hard to imagine him going back to number three when he’s fit again. Dáire O’Leary started five games for Cork in the league but he has been injured and hasn’t featured since the beginning of March.
Damien Cahalane came on against Limerick when Joyce got injured and maybe they’ll stick with him, even though it looked like they had written him off as their first-choice full back a few years ago.
In my time playing for Galway, I marked a good few Cork full backs. Diarmuid O’Sullivan was coming towards the end of his career when I started, but after that I came up against players like Eoin Cadogan and Stephen McDonnell. We played Cork in the league final in 2010 and the full back was Eoin Dillon, but he never made it as a championship player afterwards.
I marked Cahalane over the years too. He’s strong and quicker than people might think. Often players look bigger on television than they are in real life, but Cahalane was actually bigger up close than he looked from a distance. He’d do his share of pulling and dragging but you always knew what you were going to get with him. He was inclined to give away frees and everybody knew that too.
We often targeted Cork full backs over the years and that’s what Waterford will do this weekend. Waterford will try to make sure whoever is playing number three for Cork will be the last man back and they will look to isolate him.
In that context, the match-ups will be critical for Cork. If Cahalane plays, Cork will probably want him to pick up Seán Walsh. Seán O’Donoghue could pick up Stephen Bennett, with Niall O’Leary possibly on Dessie Hutchinson. Cork are not guaranteed to win any of those battles.
It will be interesting to see how much game time Austin Gleeson gets. I know he didn’t come back into the panel fully until after the league and maybe he doesn’t have 70 minutes in the tank, but I’d prefer to start him and see what he could give for 40 or 45 minutes. That would, in my view, be a better use of him than bringing him on if Waterford are chasing the game.
The key for Cork is to shut down Bennett and not give away too many frees. Clare and Tipperary failed to manage that. I think Cork will have too much firepower for Waterford, though.
Elsewhere, Dublin should have too much for Wexford, even though the game is at Wexford Park. I was in Nowlan Park for Wexford’s game against Kilkenny and I was disappointed with them. I was expecting them to be in Kilkenny’s faces and to really take the game to them, but none of that happened. Their dependence on Lee Chin has gone too far now. When Kilkenny were able to hold him, Wexford didn’t have any other big threat.
In their last 11 meetings in the championship, Wexford have only beaten Dublin once. Most of those games in recent years have been tight and they drew in the league in Croke Park earlier in the year. Even so, I think Dublin are in a better place than Wexford and I wouldn’t be surprised if they put up a big score.
