featured-image

I’ll be accused of over-Corking my intro, but the value of our hurlers to this championship, both from generating an atmosphere on matchday to generating a tidy profit at the gate on the way in, was so obvious last Saturday. Now I know the afternoon on the whole was far more flat than fizzing, but Semple Stadium would have been a small-town library if Cork hadn’t turned out in the droves they did. The following this team has is phenomenal.

With four counties involved, you’d have expected a great deal of colour painted through the stands and terraces. Instead, three quarters of the place was draped in red. That following will go up the road to Croker in a fortnight in phenomenal numbers.



And we’ll duly deal with that next fortnight further down. Let’s just stay in Thurles for the time being. The game transpired largely as I thought it might.

There was a constant inevitability that Cork were not going to falter here. To give Dublin their dues, their stick-passing was sharp, especially from the puckout where Seán Brennan would pinpoint a midfielder or half-forward that had peeled out toward the sideline. But reducing all that to a pile of rubble was their absolutely dreadful execution.

They lacked the marksmen to get them over the line, or even just to put the sliotar between the posts. Cork, while below par, had the hurlers capable of finding the target with regular frequency. Sounds simple.

Dublin succeeded in making it look difficult. No more than the Offaly game,.

Back to Fashion Page