WE IN THE sporting press like to preview a game by looking back at previous matches between the teams.
Cork-Offaly offers the chance to revisit the classic encounter between the pair in 1999, and Offaly’s unforeseen revenge the next year; the sting in the tail of a brilliant, ageing group.
It doesn’t matter that these games have nothing to do with what will happen at Tullamore today – it’s fun, and that if that is not reason enough then we may as well kill off the back pages now; print, digital, virtual hologram and whatever comes next.
Yet why go back to ’99 and 2000, when you cast the eye to 1984? A time when none of the current players were born; a time of small backroom teams, big hurleys, few helmets and far more people watching on from atop the wall at the back of the terrace.
There were less thrown hand passes also, because to get the ball in your hand you’d have to risk the wrath of your manager and the intactness of your fingers by catching the ball in the first place. Pull first and deal with every subsequent problem thereafter – that’s how it seemed.
Some might call it a different sport entirely to the one we enjoy so much today. Some might well be correct. Either way, I find myself drawn to these games from different times. Match of the 70s, The Big Match Revisited, GAA Gold – all set to record. The Cork-Offaly 1984 final on YouTube . . . I’m watching that, probably twice. Such practices didn’t start with Covid and end with a jab or three for me.
I have a wise colleague who thinks all pre-2000 nostalgia should be banned. I would agree, except I can barely remember anything that’s happened this century. As Noel Gallagher said of Knebworth – things mattered more then, before the internet took over. Down with the internet and up with the 1984 final on YouTube.
If the past is a foreign country, then perhaps it is one from which we can learn the odd thing. First-time striking of the sliotar will probably only ever come back into vogue if it is as legal as a thrown handpass. But sometimes you wonder if protecting possession should extend to lobbing the ball four yards to a teammate facing the wrong way, tight to the sideline with two opponents on his back. There is a time and a place for moving the ball quickly.
That time and place, our coaching elite have decided, is the fairly distant past, so if you want to see hurlers untroubled by possession stats then that is where you must go.
There is an illicit thrill to the disregard for possession. I suppose they knew at the time the ball was coming right back at them so prudence was not essential. Still, it’s captivating – you’re half in shock at what would now be regarded as awful, reckless decisions and at the same time taken by what Ben Kingsley described in the old gangster film Sexy Beast as “the sheer fuckoffness of it all”.
The past was a gunslinger’s paradise, and there were fewer teams more trigger happy than Cork. And in that leave-it-fly heyday nobody was more single minded and magnificent in his striking than John Fenton. To this day he believes we should always plan in the knowledge that the ball travels faster than any off-the-shoulder runner.
“Quick, fast ground ball behind the defence will certainly upset the rhythm,” he told The 42 in 2022. He said this not as a call to arms in some hurling culture war, just a reminder that you can trouble backs in many ways, and one remains going fast and direct.
Look at the ’84 video and you can see that Fenton was a true believer even by the standards of the time. Any chance he got, the ball was getting struck first time. There would be the odd fresh air swing, but when he connected it was often as if the ball disappeared only to materialise at a random point near the square with Jimmy Barry Murphy and Seanie O’Leary in pursuit and defenders trying to shake clear their disorientation. The purity of the connection and the technique employed render it all as close to art as the game gets.
Cork’s opening goal that day came from a Fenton lift and rapid strike (around a minute in on the above video). From there it’s all about guile and reactions in the moment. Tomás Mulcahy is on the break and flicks it into Jimmy Barry Murphy’s path. He draws the attention of two defenders, at least one should have been closer to O’Leary, who JBM finds with a deft flick of the hand. The poacher controls it and volleys to the goal.
It’s sophisticated stuff, streetwise and fast-thinking, the attackers acting as a unit in a manner which feels like the right mix between improvisation and design.
It might look like Fenton is just getting it launched as quick as he can. And he is – doing it so swiftly that an opponent with a 37-inch hurley can’t get in a block. But he’s striking to a place where he knows there will be a teammate, and at a pace and trajectory which will favour them over the backs. It’s chaos, but for the defence rather than the attack.
First-time hurling still makes the odd cameo at the highest level. Declan Dalton’s pull against Limerick caused last month was a joyous moment, if not for teammate Seamus Harnedy who got upended in the frenzied whip.
Galway unsettled the Limerick defence in the 2022 All-Ireland semi-final when David Burke did not strike the ball first time, but rose it and hit without catching. Mike Casey couldn’t react quickly enough for once, the pace of delivery allowed Brian Concannon to get the jump, win possession and strike to the net.
Kids are still taught to hurl as four and five year olds from the ground up. A couple of years later they are allowed rise the ball and the game slows down, lots of rucks. Some time then goes by before things get back up to speed, if they ever really do. A certain primacy is lost.
As well as being effective, first-time striking looks cool. The day this doesn’t matter is the day all sport gets handed over to those with a minimum of four coaching badges each.
There is a visceral appeal to a hurler connecting first time. They are taking thousands of years of artistry and doubling on it. The crowd is lifted, taken out of the ordinary by the satisfying aesthetic and sound.
Fashion is cyclical and you never know when something can reappear. A software engineer does not want the user to take four clicks to get somewhere when he can design it for one. If a hurler can get to the point where they don’t need to catch and handpass so much, or catch and strike, and instead have scanned before the ball arrives and can flick or volley accurately to the next player then they are buying time and space for their teammate. Plenty of them do this now, of course, but to my eyes at least it does not seem to be a central part of many game plans.
In future, it’s possible footage of today’s hurling will look ponderous compared to a game where things happen with one or two touches rather than two or three.
Even then it would be wrong to denigrate the players of now, just as it makes no sense to overlook what was happening in 1984. Not just from a stylistic point of view. The very meeting of Cork and Offaly now stirs memories of such games – games that helped to embed the passion for the sport in either county.
Hurling is vital to the collective esteem for counties like Cork and Offaly. People from both want their team to be successful more than they even imagine. This hits hardest in the seconds following a return to that half-forgotten winning feeling.
Ecstatic Cork supporters teemed onto the pitch from the Blackrock End after the Munster championship classic against Limerick last month. Offaly’s crowd swarmed Nowlan Park following the U20 triumph. Few of those leading the Faithful charge look like they were around in ’98 or ’85, the same for those in red and ’99 or ’84 or further back again. Yet in such times something arresting and real becomes apparent: this is us. Alive in this moment, binded to everything that has gone before.
