Cork V Tipperary Preview 2009

24th May 2009

Cork V Tipperary Preview
Finbarr Barry

Semple Stadium: Unofficial home of Cork hurling

Gathering in such enormous numbers with fellow Rebels for a GAA event that actually involves a match is a welcome novelty for Cork fans heading for Thurles this Sunday. Normally any Cork crowd bigger than five thousand usually means marching around town with placards or standing around in the cold listening to speeches about trying to get the best Cork team out on the pitch.

At long last the championship has arrived and whatever drained Cork fans have experienced since last November it's finally time to see top-speed no holes barred hurling action.

In recent months all fans have had to cheer about were the appearance of their team on the back of an articulated truck or the words of a rabble rousing supporter from the back of a mini-pick up truck in the rain. This time there will be no there will be no speeches from well known former hurlers or anti-county board comedians.

This Sunday Cork fans will roar in delight and feel a shiver up their spine only when a sliothar is fired between the posts by Cork ash. Only when a Cork hand plucks a stinging sliothar from the sky. Only when a Tipperary man is sent crashing to the ground by a Cork shoulder. There has been enough talking. It's time for action.

Pat Kenny seconds from lobbing the gob at Miriam O'Callaghan.

RTE SWITCH
Another welcome substitution will be the RTE personnel that report events of interest to Cork fans. Instead of Pascal Sheehy's professionally worried face and voice of perpetual tension standing outside Pairc Úi Chaoimh (in that full length rain coat he got for his confirmation) we will have the drama of Michael Ó Muircheartaigh's action packed exclamations from inside Semple Stadium - as he attempts to commentate on an entire match in a single seventy minute never ending bilingual sentence.

After the big day out instead of Miriam O'Callaghan trying to keep in her pro-player feelings on Primetime we'll have Pat Spillane struggling to hold back his lifelong distain for the blood and bandage on the Sunday Game. Strangely, it'll be good to have his Kerry broad-vowel mashing vocalisations back on the telly. We look forward to watching him squirm uncomfortably as the pundits debate which of the Cork players should get man of the match.

SANDWICHES AND TAE
And what's a proper GAA day out without sandwiches and 'de tae'?! If there was ever anything that would eliminate all these fancy pesto wraps and goats cheese paninis from post-Celtic Tiger Cork it's a Munster championship battle against Tipp in the middle of a recession. This is no time for gently brewed cannoli bean soup, Darina. We need food for the trenches!

The Harrington's take a break at Glengarrif on the way to Semple.

That doesn't mean there isn't good choice when it comes to making a good GAA sandwich: you can choose thick white sliced pan or eh…thin white sliced pan. If you're lucky you might squeeze in a second round of ham and an extra lick of mayonnaise. Don't tell the purists though.

Barry's Tea are doing some tasty herbal brews at the moment but you'll have to leave that fancy-dan stuff behind you on Leeside and put the real blend into the flask for the battle in Thurles.

Any sign that you could be deviating from the type of tae that has been consumed in Cork for over 3 million years (ish) would be outright blasphemy. Not only that but you could be accused of committing one of the biggest crimes in GAA followers unwritten rulebook: losing the run of yourself. Besides, it'll take centuries before any tae that you can't put milk into gets official hard-shoulder-dining GAA fan approval for the half time tipple.

The old Irish trait of begrudgery is boiling inside many GAA people from the 'other 31' so regardless of the result at full time, Cork fans should be aware that anti-Cork scribes in the national media have already got their headlines written.

Unable to resist the temptation of linking the winter's events with what happens on the field, internal Cork GAA matters become a field day for half-informed hacks and mockyeah broadcasters from outside the People's Republic - desperately trying to fit flawed punditry to their barely concealed hatred for the Cork jersey like a pre-school toddler trying to put a square shape into a roundy hole.

Our new match predicting machine outputs its results on CDR.

Boys, it's not our fault you spent your career getting pasted by men in red and white!

COMPUTER SAYS YES
Speaking of predictable punditry, you know you need to look no further than this page for an accurate assessment of Sunday's score line. At PROC headquarters we've recently installed new state-of-the-art technology that can determine the result of a hurling or football match with mesmerising accuracy.

We fed all the relevant data into the computer terminal including detailed but obscure information such as weather forecast, length of grass at the Killinan End, Pa Cronin's boot size, Denis Walsh's speech after the league game against Limerick, the price of burgers and chips in Thurles and the number of times Tipp have bottled it against Cork at the unofficial home of Cork hurling.

Finally after tirelessly satisfying the software's insatiable appetite for facts and figures our new machine whizzed and whirred for quiet a while. It seemed to be thinking deeply about Cork's inevitable half-time deficit and the second half comeback. Then it did some more computation before finally spitting out a result in large red letters: "Revenge for 2008: Rebels by a landslide - Press OK to continue".

Up the Rebels!