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Hoggie and his people. Laszlo Geczo/INPHO

Cork make their hurling public fall in love with them all over again

The Great Entertainers could still go out of the Munster championship next weekend, but what a travesty that would be as they inflict a filleting on Tipperary.

DON’T TAKE OUR WORD for it, but take the word of say, Joe Seward, the sports radio presenter from Cork.

‘Today’s official attendance here @semplestadium is 43,972 and 70% seem to be from Leeside,’ he Tweeted before Cork’s massacre of Tipperary.

It’s only taken a week, but it’s as if the Gods of Cork hurling have awoken from their slumbers. As if, if you will, the idea that next year twenty years will have gone past and Liam MacCarthy and the De Banks would be distant strangers.

Once friends, but time passed and distance grown would make it, well, awkward?

They might just duck their heads rather than go through the whole remaking acquaintances after all this time.

Now they believe. It’s different now.

And yet, they could be out at this time next week, if Waterford and Limerick were to be level at the end of their concluding round of Munster championship.

What rough justice that would be! After the thriller against Limerick and this scorched earth policy in action in Semple, is it possible that the most entertaining team of 2024 could find themselves in the ejector seat when the Munster championship concludes? 1-25, 3-24, 3-28, 4-30 scorelines, all for nothing? Let’s hope not.

In an eight-day window, the Cork public now believe in their team.

Not like 2021. That was an exercise in optimism. It ended in a 16-point defeat in the final to Limerick.

Now, it’s a manic, obsessed, suffocating and – call a spade a spade here – little bit creepy and twisted love (might not even be love, per se) that Cork have for their hurlers. For Cork, this is nothing to be put off about. That’s the correct and time-honoured state they need to be in. It’s just better that way.

Where it all ends, they don’t know. But neither are being cool about it either. It caught fire a week ago, but when they came to Semple, Cork might as well have performed a carpet bombing of Tipperary, their hurlers, their people and their way of life.

Sometimes you wonder, in competitions with built-in teams and captive audiences, if they trade a little too much on past glories.

Certainly, others aren’t shy in telling us that they find us a bit, well, full-on about the GAA.

Cork-Tipp in Thurles one of the features of Irish summers and a two-county nostalgia factory, cranking out the touchstones, rolling them off the end of the belt. At times you feel the whole thing could slip into parody until the games themselves start.

It’s not just the same oul soup heated up again. It’s always a lively dish, old staples with new spices. In a perpetual state of reinvention.

And this had an incendiary beginning. Noel McGrath feathering a beautiful pass to Conor Bowe. Bowe letting off a shot off his left side, Cork goalkeeper Patrick Collins batting it back out, only for Mark Kehoe to be standing in the right spot to send it to the net.

15 seconds. It’s on. Picture of Niall Quinn leisurely relaxing in the stands. Possibly a bottle of Finches in hand and a belly of Bulmers. All is well with the Tipp nation. Another chapter in the glorious history ahead. Naturally. Of course. As it was, is and ever shall be…

Take it on now to the following scenario;

55 minutes are gone.

Cork are 14 points up with three consecutive monstrous Shane Kingston efforts from the right wing. One thing though; every single shot was taken without even the merest suggestion of pressure on Kingston.

This coming after a spectacular Alan Connolly hat-trick.

And still Cork had Conor Lehane to unload from the bench. From where he was sitting he could see it was a generous party. A free-for-all. He made sure to get the brackets after his name, pushing the margin out to 15 points.

Hoggie goal then. 18 points. How did that happen?

Tipperary have left us baffled over the last two months.

After a decent regulation league campaign, they were entirely out of sorts on a miserable league semi-final in Portlaoise. That was the day they burned through four different free-takers.

It was so bad, it felt like performance art. But it was quickly written off as one of those things, Clare’s want for a title and silverware being fluffed up and pumped up. Tipp, we were told and we assumed, would be saving themselves for the real stuff.

That moment never arrived. A 15-point loss to Limerick was their opening contribution to the Munster championship on the second weekend. The Tipp crowd was conspicuous by absence.

They never came back. A draw with Waterford?

It brings to mind a line apparently delivered by a former Meath footballer when taking training one night in 2011 with his club. Asked to share the enthusiasm for Cian Ward’s 4-3 tally against Louth, the former star shot back, ‘Against Louth? I wouldn’t bother me hole.’

As the camera panned to manager Liam Cahill and his trainer Mikey Bevans towards the end, Marty Morrissey and Michael Duignan made the requisite coo-ing and hand-wringing. They asked how they would even think about getting their players up for next weeks’ concluding round against Clare, with nothing on the line.

The kind of pointless and insincere messages that are thrown around at a wake.

Tipperary hurling needs a factory reset.

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