Long after the crowd had left Croke Park a dozen or more Tipperary players sat in clusters on the pitch, basking in the brilliance of the day.
Lying among the golden streamers, one of the players moved his arms and legs in the shape of a star jump, as if he were at the beach with his buddies, giddy and sun-kissed. Like Alice, they had passed through the looking glass to a place nobody had imagined.
Explanations trailed miles behind the bewildering events that shaped the outcome. Trailing by six points at the break, Tipperary consumed Cork like a pill in the second half, reducing the most prolific team in the championship to a pair of scores that only had each other for company. For their part, Tipp scored 3-14, essentially without reply.
For a group of players and management who had suffered humiliations in last year’s Munster championship and desertion by thousands of their supporters, this shot at redemption had no status outside their wildest dreams. In the end, they won the All-Ireland by winning six championship matches in a row, eliminating last year’s champions, the Leinster champions and the League and Munster champions in a cannonball run.
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Other All-Ireland finals over the years had jackknifed, one way or another, but this game has no context beyond itself. Limerick were on the end of an 11-point swing in the closing minutes of the 1994 All-Ireland final against Offaly; Cork led by eight points with 13 minutes left in the 1972 final and ended up losing to Kilkenny by seven. But there is a difference between a collapse and a meltdown, and this was something else again.
It was like that Ernest Hemingway line from The Sun Also Rises. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike replied. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Cork missed a chance to go seven points up immediately after half-time, and by the time they scored their first point of the second half, 11 minutes later, their half-time lead had been wiped out and replaced by a menacing two-point deficit. The momentum of the game had shifted perceptibly, and then violently.
Tipp’s scores came in storms, lightning first, then thunder. In the long history of Cork and Tipperary, so many things have happened that something was bound to happen twice. In the closing minutes of the 1984 Munster final, when Tipp were cradling a four-point lead, John Sheedy stopped a ball that was going over the bar and deflected it into Seanie O’Leary’s path for a goal that turned the game on its head.
Here, it happened in reverse. Patrick Collins got his hurley to a shot that was flying low over the crossbar, but it trampolined off his hurley like a tennis ball and into the path of John McGrath, the greatest poacher in the modern game.
His cold finish gave Tipp the lead for the first time in the 45th minute and for the next 20 minutes, McGrath tormented Cork. For Tipp’s second goal, McGrath caught a ball sharply by his hip, like a cricketer at silly mid-off, and tempted Eoin Downey to bring him down. The young Cork full back had already been booked, and for the second time in this year’s championship, Cork were reduced to 14 men.
Dublin and Tipp had pulled off monumental victories with a man down in recent weeks, but that was a statistical aberration that has no future as a trend.
Darragh McCarthy dispatched the penalty with fierce authority. In a staggering performance he scored 14 times from 15 shots, missing nothing from dead balls and hitting four points from play. His rookie season had been hit by earthquakes from the first minute sending off in Páirc Úi Chaoimh in May to the double yellow card in the semi-final; somehow, he kept his balance.
The coup de grace, though, was left to McGrath. With 10 minutes left, he got his stick to a long ball and deflected it to the net. Collins in the Cork goal should have attacked the dropping ball ferociously with his hurley, but like so much else in the second half, Cork were made to look indecisive and lost in a fog.
Tipperary dictated the tactical shape of the match, and that has been a recurring pattern in Cork’s All-Ireland defeats, stretching back to the 2006 final when Kilkenny crowded their defensive half. In 2013, 2021, last year and this year, Cork’s opponents brought something to the final that forced Cork to react.
Liam Cahill’s gambit was to play a seventh defender. For a few years in the middle of the last decade, when sweepers were in vogue, the self-fulfilling prophecy of the furious sceptics was that no team could score enough to win an All-Ireland with seven defenders. Tipp took that chance.
In his time as Waterford manager, Cahill had tried a sweeper against Limerick in an All-Ireland semi-final, and it failed against a team that was better in every way. In his press conference afterwards, Cahill said they knew they might have to abandon it 15 minutes into the second half if Cork had built on their half-time lead. But by then, they had Cork on the run. The lemons had lined up on the slot machine.
Tipp intended to congest Cork’s running lanes and keep the ball out of Brian Hayes’ hands, and by those cuts, Cork bled out.
Noel McGrath, one of the greatest Tipperary forwards of all time, came on with 10 minutes left and scored the final point. About an hour-and-a-half after the final whistle, he returned to the pitch with his young son, who was no taller than the hurley he was swinging. Just the two of them, nobody else.
If we never see McGrath in Croke Park again, he has been an ornament to the game. For his career, this exclamation point was glorious.
