All-Ireland SFC Qualifier Roscommon v Cork: The pressure on the players and managers from both counties is immense. Keith Duggan finds out how Cork are coping

As soon as the draw for the first round of the football qualifiers was made late last Sunday evening, one fixture stood out like a sore thumb. Even on paper, Roscommon versus Cork in Hyde Park is enough to make sturdy men wince.

Tomorrow, the sounds of bone cracking on bone will be heard clearly throughout the west. They really should give parental warning at the turnstiles.

It is a fixture that the players of both counties must have seen materialise with sinking hearts. A championship exit at this early stage will represent a massive blow to the losing county.

Roscommon have advanced satisfactorily under Tom Carr, despite a luckless enough league relegation. But losing this will leave them wondering if they are not back at square one.

Drawing Galway and Cork in their first two championship encounters is as tough as it gets, especially when they compare their fate to the other teams from Division One A also involved in tonight's death dance. But their task is straightforward.

For Cork, the issue is more complex. This is the biggest game of Larry Tompkins' long and eventful tenure and never have Cork been such a closed book.

After a respectable league showing, Cork imploded completely by the Lee against Limerick on an afternoon that shook football foundations in the county.

"To be honest, there is still a lot of puzzlement in Cork as well as everywhere else," says the former All-Star and Cork captain Mark O'Connor.

"The thing that strikes you about Cork over the past season or two is their inconsistency. Going back to their early performances against Kerry last summer, a lot of people were very heartened then.

"But the lack of discipline and focus that prevailed in the All-Ireland semi-final was the complete opposite. And that has been a feature ever since."

The walloping they took against Limerick was beyond explanation for a lot of observers. Present was Colin Corkery, one of the most prolific scorers in the game.

Along with him was the successful Nemo Rangers contingent - their return seemed to bolster Cork's steady league run and, although they lost against Tyrone to lose out on a semi-final place, all looked rosy.

But there have been problems. The selection of Michael O'Cronin - a natural and often devastating centre-forward - in the corner did not come off.

Faced with a bristling and confident Limerick side, Cork appeared to lack leaders, hence the call that Tompkins had dispatched the old guard of Ronan McCarthy, Joe Kavanagh and Ciaran O'Sullivan with too much haste. O'Sullivan was an All-Star as recently as 1999.

The management resisted calls to invite one, or all three, to rejoin the panel. The retirement of Philip Clifford, the young footballer of the year in 1999 and Cork's captain for the last All-Ireland appearance of Tompkins' tenure, was due to business commitments. Although his form had dipped since that season, to have a player of such potential sitting at home is far from ideal.

But Tompkins can only go with the players he has got. The thing is, Cork have the players. The manager has always worn his heart on his sleeve when it comes to his passion for the county. He wasted no time in throwing his weight behind his players during the stand-off with the county board in the new year.

Regularly, and sometimes bitterly, he defends his players from perceived slights, such as Graham Canty's omission from the All-Star nominations list last December. In essence, he is a player's man. But, as a manager, he has never stood on more delicate ground.

The team has played two challenge games since the Limerick debacle, narrowly beating Clare 1-13 to 0-15 and then losing to Wexford 2-15 to 1-17 - with Corkery accounting for 1-10 of that total. Those games can have only partially restored confidence.

They face a Roscommon team that played with diligence against Galway, a game that will leave them with the belief that they have sufficient talents to undo Cork at Hyde Park, never an easy venue to visit.

"It is a real crossroads for Cork football," says O'Connor. "Both these teams can play football, but the pressure of this situation is going to turn the game into a dog-fight, I think.

"Cork are probably going to try new formations as well, so it is a step into the unknown in every sense. And Tom Carr is going to have Roscommon utterly focused on this.

"I am still inclined to go for a Cork win because I think that the sense of desperation and the need to salvage something from the season will actually help the players on."

As ever, there are a thousand 'ifs'. If Brendan Ger O'Sullivan goes heat-seeking, there could be goals aplenty. If Corkery gets a good sniff of the western breeze, he could kick Ros' out of the championship from 50 metres.

If Cork are on song, they are capable of erasing whatever stands in their way. The obstacle tomorrow is one of the most obdurate and tenacious teams in the game. It won't be pretty. And for Larry Tompkins, whatever happens, it won't be forgotten.

The burden of expectation. . .