When Cork lost a classic but gained their spurs

Munster SHC/Cork v Waterford: Tom Humphries on last year's marvellous Munster final, which helped the losers and hurt Waterford

To attain wisdom, says the poet Roger McGough, arrive after the event. So it is with last year's Munster hurling final. It shapes most coherently when you look back. The finest day of hurling all summer long, perhaps the finest game of this half-spent decade. Cork lost but it might just have been the day that saved their summer. Looking back, with no anger, Cork find they took more away than their conquerors.

In the aftermath Waterford were placed on sabbatical. Six weeks of listlessness with Kilkenny at the end, hurling's equivalent of a year's hard labour to be followed by execution. Cork picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, played a couple of games and arrived in the All-Ireland semi-final knowing more about themselves than most sides.

The game and its aftermath made a compelling case for the restructuring of the hurling championship format. It might yet be seen to represent the high point of the McCarthy era in Waterford hurling. Whatever. It stands out as a landmark game and deserves celebration as such.

At the end of it all, as the sun declined and the dust was quelled and the air stopped vibrating, Colm O'Rourke and Joe Brolly stood on the steps outside the press area in Semple Stadium and the two eminent football men gazed at the scene of their first Munster hurling final.

"Football should be abolished," said Brolly. "We should do away with it now. Everyone should hurl. Everyone should experience that."

"I've never seen anything like that," said O'Rourke.

And they stood and gazed some more.

Truth is neither had most of those present experienced anything like it. Great games have to be squeezed out of the most compelling contexts and as the rivalry between the two southern neighbours ripens annually so the lustre of last summer's clash brightens.

Context. Cork and Waterford could entertain you richly in the circumstances of a winter league game in Dungarvan. But who would care? Last year in Thurles, the chips were stacked high enough to scrape the clouds. There was a sense of jeopardy from both sides, a sense of having a lot to lose and a desperate will not to lose it.

Cork, beaten All-Ireland finalists the previous September had more than just an illustrative point to make to their uppity neighbours. A win for Waterford would fill their sails and possibly make them an irritant for some years to come. And there was the dead weight of tradition as well. It had been 45 years since Waterford beat Cork in a Munster final.

There was more added to the stakes even as the game unfolded. Waterford bore the adversity of a nightmarish goal conceded within four minutes of the throw-in. They played the first half with the wind at their backs yet trailed by the width of that goal at half-time.

Then John Mullane got sent off. He'd scored 3-1 on Cork in the previous year's Munster final and his ability to accelerate from zero to 60 miles an hour in two seconds flat when the ball hits his palm made him perhaps the most compelling figure on the field. Then in the 38th minute, boom - he was gone.

So at that juncture in a fine game of hurling Waterford were pared down to 14 men, playing against the wind and trailing by two points against cocky neighbours. Game on.

That Waterford dug a win out of themselves seems all the more remarkable as time passes.

The enduring memory of the final seconds is Ken McGrath leaping to pull a ball down into his fist and standing momentarily with the ball raised high over his head. Excalibur.

By then they had a right to be in a corner licking their wounds. In need of a good start they saw instead a harmless Garvan McCarthy ball bobble past Stephen Brenner and into the net. All sorts of vistas opened up. All of them appalling.

Within minutes it was 1-3 to 0-1 and Cork were floating like butterflies, stinging like bees. You began to fear for Waterford. A bad defeat would knock them on to the seat of their pants for a long, long count. Might be a summer. Might be a decade.

There are no sure things in hurling's hinterland.

A pair of well-executed goals revived them like a pinch of smelling salts. After quarter of an hour Eoin Kelly, who'd had a turbulent spring, essayed an adventurous-looking solo run around the back of the Cork defence. While men in red jerseys howled about how many steps he'd taken, Kelly's shot, squeezed off at a tight angle and under pressure, just rifled into the Cork net.

Still Cork were irresistible. Waterford slipped beneath the surface again. Four points. Five points. Then 11 minutes after Kelly had burgled a goal Waterford broke and entered again.

Dan Shanahan, famous until last season for his trademark wides, scored enough goals last summer to develop what might be called a trademark goal. He pulled another one out, slipping sylphlike in behind the full-back line and beating a horrified Diarmuid O'Sullivan to a dropping ball.

Five goals in three championship matches for Shanahan; 1-3 in the first half of a Munster final. No stranger things have happened in magic-realist novels.

Shanahan would wane a little in the second half but the damage was done.

"He got in there all right," remembers O'Sullivan, "and in fairness to him, he was a man on top of his game last year. He was taking some stopping all day and when you look back, the damage could have been worse."

So many times you thought Waterford were circling the drain about to disappear. They got a tonic of a point just on the restart after tea and harangues. Then Mullane took a pop at Brian Murphy. Thank you, and good night.

Mullane's departure - he had two points chalked up when he left - was surprising and it wasn't surprising. Early in the summer he had been riled mightily by Clare's backs and he suffered stoically, his task lightened by his side's ease. He had looked solid against Tipp too, and going into the Munster final he bore the countenance of a man who had seen much and done more and was determined now to atone for everything.

As the afternoon progressed, though, he debated with referee Seán McMahon more and more.

The game was boiling all round him and boiling inside his head too. From the stand you could almost feel the rage within him. He popped and then subsided in regret all within seconds. Could you have Mullane without the rage? Another case of the very thing that makes you rich makes you poor.

He was gone and Waterford hung in until another remarkable goal. This one in the 52nd minute.

For most mortals striking a dead ball in hurling is a matter of sending it in a straight line to a desired destination. The rare few conjure and meddle with topspin and fades. Eoin Kelly of Tipp. DJ. Paul Flynn.

This time Flynn stepped up, as much Errol now as Paul, and loitered over a 30-metre free wondering what mischief it might make. He struck the sliotar with venomous topspin. From the stands it appeared to shoot straight to the Cork net, implicating the Cork defence. In truth, the ball dipped viciously at the last second and defenders who felt they were watching a ball fly over the bar were suddenly playing on a losing side. Waterford had 3-12. Cork had 1-17.

The margin would be the same at the finish. The pace of the game would accelerate even further.

"The game plan for an extra man is to secure your puck-outs," says Cork coach Donal O'Grady of the series of short pucks-outs to Diarmuid O'Sullivan, "then you hope they'll run out of steam. We didn't do that, we didn't work hard enough to get out to the wings and spread them out a little bit. Waterford came at us after the break but we had the breeze and we had just settled when John Mullane got sent off.

"He's one of their best forwards and I think in our heads we felt, ah we'll get home here now. And we would have won perhaps if the Paul Flynn goal hadn't come on top of it. I think there were some questions about the way our defence was organised for that."

Athletes talk sometimes about living under the skin of the game, being so involved and so focused that all externalities vanish. At the end in Thurles, Shanahan didn't know the score. He turned to Seán Óg Ó hAilpín and asked.

"You can imagine the pleasure I had telling Dan they had won by a point," says Seán Óg. "I'll picture his face to my dying day. Priceless."

It took the rest of the summer to bring the final twist in the tail. Waterford's exit. Cork's exultant September.

"It hurt," Justin McCarthy said recently. "It hurt too that the Munster final was played down by some people. If Cork and Tipp were playing in it they'd still be talking about it. We got the breaks that day maybe but we didn't want to stop there. I didn't want to stop there."

The rewards were dubious. If the Munster final was played down in some traditionalist houses then the aftermath didn't help. Waterford made an unwise move to have Mullane's suspension deferred. And the six-week break until they took the field again lagged them a little.

O'Sullivan remembers the trauma of losing but the comforts of routine were soon restored.

"Once we got over it, it benefited us to be playing Tipperary and Antrim before we got to an All-Ireland semi-final. You need the games, really. You can train and train and train but a match lifts you. It's good to have games to look forward to, especially in the summer when it's the time for hurling. I don't think waiting six weeks does a team any good."

O'Grady has similar views.

"The game that defined our season was the game against Tipp in Killarney. I was glad when we were drawn against Tipp. Against Waterford we didn't use the ball as well as we did later in the summer. We had to focus and clear the minds. It was good to get back to a traditional rivalry. I said to them on the Wednesday after we lost to Waterford, 'We're starting a championship now. We can't lose'. That was the springboard. The Munster final is irrelevant unless you make progress."

What mattered back then matters now. It's surprising to look back at last year's calendar and see how early the summer reached its high point. The Leinster final would produce a good kick at the end but nothing in terms of the quality its southern equivalent gave us. Everything else was mildly disappointing.

This year the summer could climax even earlier. Tomorrow at Semple Stadium may just be the only chance to liberate hurling from the ruling duopoly. Maybe not. Cork and Kilkenny both lost provincial finals last year and emerged not just as September finalists but as the favourites for this year's race.

Where that Munster final stands is for history to decide. Those involved were too involved. The aftermath was too jarring for winners and losers.

"To compare it with other games is hard for me," says O'Grady. "You look for a win or a draw. You sit down and dissect it dispassionately, ball by ball. I don't know where it stands in the annals. It was passionate. It had colour and excitement. The manner in which they won it, they held on with 14 men. It was exciting. I just saw us using the ball badly under pressure in the last 10 minutes. Where it stands, I don't know.

"The time moves very quickly. You look at the watch and there's 25 minutes gone. Look again and there's three minutes left. You're under pressure the whole time but trying to watch the game dispassionately. It would be great to be up on a television tower watching them play below you. You can't get involved in the emotion. You have to dissect it without getting involved but you feel the pulse of it."

Cork's complexion is pretty much unchanged and there is a feeling that even if defeat ambushed them tomorrow they would have the fortitude to again get to Croke Park the long way.

Waterford need sustenance if they are to grow.

There's context aplenty. Hurling just needs another classic.