The thing that really sticks out for me after Cork’s defeat to Tipperary is the number of ways people have been trying to find excuses for the players. It’s the county board’s fault. It’s Frank Murphy’s fault. It’s time for a root-and- branch this and a structural review of that.

I was listening to it and thinking to myself that it must be some other county people were talking about. Did Cork struggle to field a team or something? Did the players have to hitch to the game? The last time I checked, they were taking selfies with Conor McGregor on the way home from a training camp in Portugal. That’s only a month or two ago and I didn’t hear too many people calling for structural reviews at the time.

All of that stuff is important, obviously. But from a player’s point of view, one fact stands out above everything else. These players were good enough to win a Munster title last year and were robbed by a bad refereeing decision – but since then, they’ve lost championship games to two Division Three teams.

That’s the long and short of it. Those players have the craft and the ability to compete with the better teams. By any objective judgment, they were five or six points better than Kerry in that game last summer. If you go from that to losing to Tipperary inside 12 months, then either half the panel must have walked away or the players have to take a long look at themselves.

This is twice as insulting as just a normal run-of-the-mill defeat. These players have pedigree, they’ve been winning at underage for most of the past decade. They’ve been in league finals. They’ve been up for All Stars. It’s just not acceptable to have all that in your background and not live up to it.

You have to take responsibility. Justify your reputation. Certain things are non-negotiable. Every team loses but not every team reacts the right way. Cork’s last championship game was losing to Kildare last summer – how many of those players went out on Sunday promising themselves that they would make up for it? Did any of them?

That Kildare defeat should have been the first and last reason that Tipperary wouldn’t catch them on the hop. Okay, Cork got relegated in the league but that can happen. You can brush that off. But they shouldn’t have been able to brush off losing to a team that went out and conceded seven goals the next day. They should have been raging at the thought of that being their level.

I look at them sometimes and I wonder have they just become immune in a way. Do these defeats even leave a sting anymore? If the dog who turns up to the butcher’s door looking for scraps keeps getting a boot in the arse from the butcher, he’ll eventually just stay over on the far side of the street.

Cork look to me like a crowd that are far too comfortable on the other side of the street. If there’s no threat of winning anything, there’s no expectation. It’s as if they nearly don’t need the hassle of being in the position where they might feel the butcher’s boot.

Maybe I’m wrong but it looks a lot like the shame has gone out of it for some of these Cork players. If the shame goes, you’re at nothing. To really compete at the top level, it has to be such an integral part of you that a non-performance actually makes you ashamed to face people.

Look, I didn’t do everything right as a player – far from it. But I do know that losing important games had a major effect on me and that it changed how I was around people. You have to treat losing like a disease, otherwise you fall into the category of people who were good at something but weren’t actually serious about it when it came right down to it.

And if you’re that kind of player, you know it. You might be able to fool some of the people watching you, but inside, you know who you are. After a few defeats, you find yourself going out to shake hands before a game and wondering, “Does this guy respect me? Is he worrying about having to face me?”

I’ve been on both sides of that handshake. It was my responsibility to be on the right side of it – nobody else’s. It wasn’t up to the manager or the selectors or the physios or the county board. If I was thinking that way, I was looking for an escape hatch. Too many of these Cork players are checking to see where the escape hatch is.

I played with Seamus Moynihan. People used say to me that Seamus was such a lovely chap and I'd go, "Yeah, try losing with him." We'd be out for a few pints after a defeat and it would never be long before Seamus would be banging the table and calling fellas out. He was no fun to be around after a bad loss.

There was no pussy-footing with Seamus. He’d be looking lads straight in the eye and going, “You didn’t do what we talked about. What was that?” It wasn’t long before I recognised a pattern developing here so I tried to make sure that my performance levels were up at the point where Seamus wouldn’t be coming after me. Better to be the guy behind him nodding my head in agreement than to be sitting across the table getting a hosing.

I would bet good money that Stephen Cluxton is like Seamus within the Dublin panel. You see him in games where Dublin are winning by 10 points and he'd still be roaring and berating the defenders in front of him. No beating around the bush, no plamás. We're all big boys here.

Where are the big boys in the Cork panel? Ultimately, this comes down to a dressing room of players making a conscious decision that it's not good enough. Every dressing room is fluid. Guys leave and guys come in. Cork have lost leaders like Graham Canty and Noel O'Leary and Anthony Lynch but it's not like these guys left over the winter. Canty and O'Leary haven't played since 2013, Lynch since two years before that.

So where are the leaders? I totally accept that stepping up to be a leader is difficult. Some guys aren’t made out for it, some guys don’t want the hassle. But in a serious team, it’s not really up for discussion.

I remember after a Munster final defeat to Cork one year, Páidí got into the middle of a huddle and said, “There’s too many fellas here who are acting as if they’re on the outside looking in. I’m only interested in fellas who want to be on the inside looking out.” He was making eye contact with me when he said it.

That’s the gig, like it or not. It might not be in your nature but so what? You wouldn’t get away with saying long runs are not in your nature. You can’t just be one of those people who waits for the game to happen and thinks they can just join in when it comes your way. There’s plenty of room in the stands for interested observers.

Losing isn’t hurting these players as badly as it should be. I would be suspicious about the level of truth-telling that’s going on within the panel. Maybe they’re being told they’re better than they are. Maybe some of their goals and targets have been set lower than they should be.

Whatever it is, they went into the game with Tipperary either not knowing or not caring what the consequences of a below-par performance would be. Tipperary weren’t hiding in the long grass. They have a proven record of underage success in the past few years and they have a football tradition.

I have always said that a key strategy in Kerry when playing Tipperary is to give them a good reason every once in a while to stick to the hurling. People think it’s patronising to talk about the great work they do keeping the game alive as second-class citizens within their own county but that’s not it at all. Given half a chance, Tipperary will put together a decent football team. It’s important to stop them getting notions.

Cork’s players should have been going into that game saying to each other, “Someone’s going to get caught by Tipperary – it’s not going to be us. We expect them to come at us with everything but, to a man, we’re not going to let ourselves down.” Instead they looked like a gang of lads who had met up for the first time on Sunday morning.

That’s not good enough, nowhere near it. Nobody should be making excuses for them.