On the Tuesday night after making tough work of beating Waterford in the All-Ireland semi-final, Matthew Twomey and the Cork management summoned the players for a debrief.
Held scoreless for most of the first half, five points down early in the second half and only moving ahead for the first time with 56 minutes on the clock, there was much to discuss.
“It went on for a good hour and a half,” said Twomey of the meeting. “We had a frank chat about it.
“We put up a video and we left that to be self-explanatory. We went through a lot of clips. We were just saying, ‘this is not good enough, it’s not what we have worked at’. That was probably the disappointing factor, that we’d worked so hard on doing the proper things and we just went away from it.
“You can’t say it was inexperience because we were in last year’s All-Ireland final. And we were in the National League final, so it was just frustrating. I think the players held their hands up and said, ‘yeah, we lost the run of it’. So as I say, it’s back in their court now.”
Cork beat Waterford by five points in the end, pretty much as anticipated given that Waterford competed in Division Two this year. So was Twomey genuinely worried or simply taking the opportunity to demand an increase in standards ahead of the final?
“Yeah, I was [worried], there’s no point bluffing,” he said. “I know there’s leaders out on the field but you’re looking and saying, ‘where’s it going to come from?’ Because we were panicking when hitting the ball, the runs were all wrong, they were coming too deep, you were just saying to yourself, ‘who is out there that’s going to turn it around?’”
It turned out Twomey did have a player to turn things around though she was sitting behind him. Ashling Thompson. With 22 minutes on the clock, and only freshly cleared that morning of a two-match ban, the Milford colossus was brought on.
One passage of play from the third quarter of the game summed up her industry and the huge impact she had on the game, the four-time All-Ireland winner turning the ball over to win back possession in Cork’s defence and beginning a move that resulted in a Fiona Keating point.
Why she wasn’t available to start in the first half takes a little more explaining.
Sent off in their final round-robin game against Tipperary, reportedly for abusive language, the appeal process that Cork initiated dragged on and on and on.
“I rang her on the Friday night and I said, ‘I don’t think for your welfare that it would be right to start you if the appeal comes good’,” said Twomey.
“She was very unsettled. When she came into the team meeting she was drained, she was ashen. I just thought, ‘no way can we start her’. I had a quick word with her in the warm up, she looked okay but it did unsettle us, there’s no two ways about it.”
Only Twomey, Fitzgerald and Thompson herself were aware that the final appeal was taking place and the players and wider management team were only informed that it had been successful when they got off the train in Dublin, hours before throw-in.
“We knew there was a couple of indiscretions we’ll say in the ruling of it and when we questioned that . . .like, we brought nothing else forward on the second appeal and it was cleared,” said Twomey.
“That’s the frustrating part of it, it could have been sorted much earlier, that we wouldn’t have had to wait until the last minute. We brought nothing new to the table.”
There was a similar situation before last year’s final loss to Galway when Cork’s Orla Cronin was granted interim relief by the Disputes Resolution Authority to play. She’d been dismissed in the semi-final against Kilkenny and eventually got word in the run up to the decider that she could play.
“It was a quarter to 12 the night before an All-Ireland final,” recalled Twomey. “It was tough going, very tough on Orla, but on all of us. We had other players lined up to start and we had to go talking to them on the Sunday morning, that they’re not starting.”
There will be no such drama this week at least and it would be a surprise if Thompson isn’t restored to first team duty for the clash with Kilkenny.
“After the frank discussion we had with them, we asked them to just embrace it really,” said Twomey of the final build-up.
“I suppose we know ourselves that if we bring our best we’ll be hard to beat but if it’s anything less, we’re in trouble.”
