The terrifyingly binary experience of All-Ireland finals has been laid bare in the last couple of days. Go back three and four weeks to the weekend of the hurling and football finals.
That Saturday has always been a special time – a peak of optimism for both counties and their supporters, which by then incorporates even the most casually engaged.
A day later, the dreams of one side have been crushed and in those ruins, there is elation for the other.
Even the Meath match turned out to be a definitive blip, as the national league and Munster championship had already been captured
Rarely have the finals spanned such extremes. For Kerry, it was a season redeemed at the end after as demanding a run-in as any team has endured in 20 years. Three of the most intense minds in football managed Armagh, Tyrone and Donegal and yet Jack O’Connor conspicuously had the better of all three.
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Even the Meath match turned out to be a definitive blip, as the national league and Munster championship had already been captured.
Mid-July, you would have said that outgoing Cork hurling manager Pat Ryan had the brightest prospects of any of the four managers facing into the All-Ireland finals.
Like O’Connor, he had already delivered what silverware was available and his Munster title was epic and retributory – overturning a 16-point walloping by Limerick in the space of 20 days plus extra time and penalties.
More profoundly, he had reshaped Cork as a relevant presence. From the high-wire act of Páirc Uí Chaoimh in May 2024, when Cork had to beat the All-Ireland champions to stay alive in the championship and did so in a breathtaking finale, the team had played some vibrant hurling to reach the next two All-Ireland finals.
In a prescient piece of analysis at the time, Nicky English observed in these pages: “I’d say when John Kiely and his players were coming off the field and saw that rapturous Cork support clambering on to the field, they were wondering about the long-term effect of what had happened.
“It felt like the red and white genie was out of the bottle. They’ll be hoping that Tipperary put the lid back on next week.”
Of course, they didn’t.
Three of Cork’s last four championship matches against Limerick were effectively sudden death and they won all of them. As a pairing, it was a box office success.
Cork were cut slack for losing to Clare by a point in last year’s final because during the season they had tamed Limerick and discovered themselves
With their freewheeling, goal-chasing forwards, the team captured the affections of their hurling public and the run of capacity attendances had the turnstiles clicking like a Chernobyl Geiger counter.
Teams – Dublin footballers are another example – can often find travelling hopefully to be as box office as actually arriving, but once a team actually reaches the All-Ireland, the focus changes. Cork were cut slack for losing to Clare by a point in last year’s final because during the season they had tamed Limerick and discovered themselves.
Winning all before them and entering the final as hot favourites, as they did in July, doesn’t leave much sanctuary when it goes horribly wrong.
It was always going to be a long shot that Pat Ryan could be persuaded essentially to place the blame on his back-room team, which is believed to have been one of the conditions – an overhauled management – for his continuing to manage Cork.
That and a renewed three-year appointment would have required him to start all over again after a year he described on Sunday as the worst in his life, “whatever would have happened in 2025”, a reference to his brother Ray’s untimely death in March.
He has done the county some service and deserves the respite. For the future, Cork, Tipperary, and the Kerry footballers have all shown how quickly demoralising defeats can be turned around, even in the same season.
Had Kerry lost the second half of the football final to Donegal by 21 points, we’d have said our farewells to Jack O’Connor before the end of July.
Instead, last night he was handed another two years in charge. Four weeks ago, he won the All-Ireland, and 10 weeks ago, he watched on in dismay as Meath gave his team a trimming in Tullamore.
O’Connor has lost more All-Ireland finals than Pat Ryan, but he has also transformed a team’s trajectory
In those intervening six weeks, O’Connor turned around his team’s season and restored them to the top of the game.
What he was able to bring to bear on the season was something Ryan and Cork lacked: the intellectual capital and experience of steering teams through adversity to All-Ireland success.
O’Connor has lost more All-Ireland finals than Pat Ryan, but he has also transformed a team’s trajectory. Dara Ó Cinnéide told Denis Walsh on these pages in July that “Jack is exceptionally good in these situations with his back to the wall”.
That means not alone rebounding from defeats but doing so with such momentum that he has guided Kerry to All-Irelands after what could have been existential reverses on three separate occasions.
What Kerry specialise in is what Cork have been unable to do in the last 20 years – tick off All-Irelands at intervals that ensure there are always medallists on hand.
Not since 2018 has a team won the hurling with no previous medals against opponents who have them. In football, the gap is wider, going back to 2011.
Eamonn O’Sullivan’s record of eight All-Irelands spanned 38 years between 1924 and 1962, but was curiously overlooked when the managerial roll of honour was being bandied around after the All-Ireland
O’Connor had the encyclopedic experience of eight championships going all the way to the final – breezily assessing that the Armagh match reminded him of another quarter-final 16 years previously, against Dublin – and the raw material of quite possibly the greatest footballer the game has seen, David Clifford, already at the age of 26, closing in on Jack O’Shea’s four Footballer of the Year awards. Imagine if Cork had someone potentially better than Ring!
The manager himself started his career feeling resentful at the “Golden Years” generation of Mick O’Dwyer’s teams and their eight All-Irelands out of 12. Ultimately, however, O’Connor has positioned himself more as an heir to Eamonn O’Sullivan.
O’Sullivan’s record of eight All-Irelands spanned 38 years between 1924 and 1962, but was curiously overlooked when the managerial roll of honour was being bandied around after the All-Ireland. O’Connor is already more than half way through that duration with five in 21 years.
He is also the first Kerry manager since O’Sullivan to lead different generations of teams to the All-Ireland and could add further titles before he’s finished.
Already, it’s a legacy.
