Get Back Up Cubby

8th Jul 2014

In the slightly amended words of Van Morrison: your old lade told you that there’ll be days like this.

Now that the dust has settled somewhat on Sunday’s deflating Munster football final defeat to Kerry down the Páirc it might be time for some home truths. Not for players and management. But for us fans.  
 

Rarely before has there been such frustration and anger vented online at Cork performance.  

While some of the analysis has come from dedicated fans who have followed their heroes through thick ‘n’ thin for years as well as actual footballers past and present, there are also long lines of wannabe-experts with little more than a few ‘sympathy substitute’ appearances at underage dishing out idé béil learned at the School of Hindsight & Bolted Horses.

At the final whistle everyone is an expert, it seems.

Alleged reasons for the defeat have ranged from old reliable post-match punchbags like the County Board and underage neglect to more obscure and laughable ones like management’s penchant for Microsoft’s office and the players’ fondness of social media.

While anyone should be entitled to discuss, analyse and give their thoughts (our own discussion forum motto is ‘every langer has an opinion’) the post-match analysis has been arguably more all over the shop than the performance below in the Pairc on Sunday. The list of culprits for Sunday’s pasting by the Kingdom is long, varied and contradictory:

Dual players, the county board, Powerpoint presentations,  the 'I’m-a-hurlin-man-meself' crowd, lack of pride in the Cork jersey, the fear of the Kerry jersey, bad studs, Taliban beards and hipsters, inability to play a sweeper system, inability to play against a sweeper system, open football, closed-minded football, puke football, too much hand passing, too much long ball, too lateral, too head-down-and-drive-forward, too much going backwards, too many lads retiring, too many new fellas, not enough underage success, not converting the piles of underage success to senior and our own favourite here at the PROC: doing too well in the league – ah that old Gaelic game conundrum!

We’ve even got some Corkonians bizarrely hoping their own county are beaten in the next round! This is high treason and there’s never an excuse for it. No Cork fan should ever want their county to be defeated and to wish it is sick. They should be rounded up with a net, tied to a Cork flag pole, tarred with Murphy’s and Beamish and feathered in drisheen.

Now that the dust has settled let’s get down off our high horses. If you’re too bitter to muster sympathy then at least have a bit of empathy for Brian Cuthbert and the team in their first season together.
 

Aidan Walsh: dual star and hero of the Munster semi-final kicking three vital points in the last ten minutes.

Imagine how awful all those young players are feeling this week? Ouch. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment - each match sequence they were involved in playing over and over again in their heads whilst lying awake in bed or during a quiet moment at work or as the mind wanders while on some machine at the gym training for the next battle.

‘Why did I go left instead of right when my man turned? Why didn’t I stay closer to him when he walked out to the sideline? I practiced that perfect kick pass a hundred times in training why did I make a balls of it on Sunday?’

Sometimes these things just happen and science, reason and statistics can struggle to explain them. The collapse in the 2007 All-Ireland final to Kerry was a similarly perplexing result (a slightly smaller margin of defeat but at least this time we’re still in the championship).
 

Time to climb back up for Shieldsy

One of the best things Cubby’s team can take from Sunday is that expectations on Leeside are now low and as we’ve seen countless times before, GAA teams can either wilt or thrive on that sentiment. Let’s dearly hope it’s the latter and that the lads bounce back big time. They certainly have the talent.

The theory that lads who more or less give up their lives to train and play for the Rebel county don’t care about Cork football or the jersey is for bitter simpletons. These boys are proud of their county and to suggest otherwise is deeply offensive to them and to us at the PROC.    

This defeat will be a really hard one to get out of their system and the only thing we, their fans, expect is that the players and management will double their efforts in the qualifiers – not just to prove their worth to us fans but to prove it to themselves.

They are the county’s top footballers after all so lets let them regroup and bounce back. H’on the Rebels.