Cork v Wexford Was it a true classic?: Seán Moran reopens a debate that is almost as old as the game and finds opinions divided as ever
There is a reflex response after particularly good hurling matches. You don't get it so much in football and certainly not in soccer or rugby. That response is to rank the spectacle, try to validate it in a historical context. The best since . . . as good as . . . one of the top five . . . and so on.
As the crowd's collective breath regularised last Sunday, initial instincts were to categorise. "Has to be one of the best five," according to one impressed observer. "Name the other four," came the response. And the process was under way.
So many considerations affect these judgments. Supporters of winning teams will be better disposed to seeing their success blessed by posterity. Wexford defused the bomb with seconds left on Sunday but will it matter if they get blown up this afternoon? If Cork win well, the extra match becomes something worthwhile in itself. If they lose, Rory McCarthy's turn and explosive strike - the ball flying in at Donal Óg Cusack's near post - will run on a perpetual loop through their worst sporting nightmares.
Former Wexford manager and current member of Croke Park's Hurling Development Committee Liam Griffin doesn't agonise about praising last Sunday.
"I think it was a cracking game. After every match someone always says 'there were better' but you could find fault in any game. Some of the scores were fantastic and the comeback by Cork and then Wexford made it exciting. You could argue about the frees missed by Cork but I felt it was a match between two seriously committed teams.
"Another thing I'd look for is good, well-taken scoring and there was an easy fluency in the point-taking - Wexford in the first half and Cork in the second."
Babs Keating won All-Irelands as a player and a manager with Tipperary. As a columnist in the Sunday Times his views can be acerbic and he is sceptical about the claims for last weekend.
"It was hype. The way I judge a match is by looking at how the teams would analyse it themselves. Marked out of 10, Wexford would give nearly the whole team eight or nine but Cork would struggle to get up to five for most of the team. Take the two Ó hAilpíns and Joe Deane - even though he still missed a good bit - out of it and it would be a very weak average."
Not surprisingly, Billy Rackard, of the legendary Wexford hurling brothers and three times an All-Ireland medallist with the county, sees it more positively.
"Something seemed to click. The whole pattern was thrilling. I'd put it high on my list of great championship matches. You could criticise it in a few ways but it deserves its accolades. You get very few games of non-stop action with quality hurling as well. It would be great if we got an All-Ireland final like that."
But Séamus J King, author of A History of Hurling, has his reservations, making the point that in the heat of the moment people tend to lose perspective.
"When the verdict is tight until the final whistle and it's an exciting game people get caught up in the excitement of the ending and forget any shortcomings or poor play. Most people wouldn't have expected Wexford to play as well as they did. But there was quite a bit of crowding and Aodán Mac Suibhne had to throw in the ball on a number of occasions, which disrupted the run of play.
"But you have to take into account the competitiveness. If you get a match that showcases all the skills, that's an exhibition, which isn't competitive, as opposed to a tightly contested championship match.
"Journalists have been saying that it was the best game or second-best game and I wouldn't go along with that sort of thing. It's a media fantasy that comes from a desire to speak in superlatives. I saw somewhere that PD Mehigan (the writer Carbery) once said that the second Cork-Kilkenny game from 1931 was the best that he'd seen and I'd respect that.
"But this sort of thing is very much a personal, individual observation. There are no scientific criteria. No one has come up with a list of 10 things that have to be present for a 'great' match. We respond to the level of excitement that a game generates. There's more to it than the quality of hurling. There's the physical struggle, the clash of the ash and the contest - all are important."
Last Sunday gave Gerald McCarthy a perspective he hasn't had for nearly 50 years. His hurling career with Cork has been measured out with purple and gold milestones. His first All-Ireland final as a child was spent on Hill 16 watching the fabled meeting of Cork and Wexford in 1956.
Ten years on he became the only man to date to captain both senior and under-21 All-Ireland winning teams. The under-21 was harder-won with three matches against Wexford necessary before Cork finally won. Ten years further on and he was on the Cork team that began what would be a three-in-a-row with victory over Wexford.
By 1993 he was training the Cork seniors who had an absorbing three-match tilt with Wexford in that year's National League final. Six days ago McCarthy was again a spectator as the counties met in the championship for the first time in 27 years.
"I thought it was fantastic," he says. "It held the interest from start to finish and the game ebbed and flowed. Last year's Tipperary-Kilkenny game was highly praised but this surpassed it for excitement and entertainment. Maybe there were a lot of wides but it was very, very exciting."
He is reluctant to get involved in the grading process.
"It's hard to go back over games you played in yourself. Anyway you can't compare different eras. Rules change and that helps the game enormously. In the old days the emphasis was on backs stopping forwards from playing. Now it's more positive. Full back is a prime example. Nowadays he has to be one of the best hurlers. The lighter ball is a huge factor."
Griffin concedes the general point but can roll-call the memorable stuff.
"Going back, I'd say last year's Kilkenny-Tipperary semi-final was a super match and our own Leinster final with Offaly in 1996. Further back, particularly for a Wexford man, the 1960 All-Ireland final was a fantastic occasion for me. Tipperary had one of the great teams and Wexford were written off."
Not all of the recalled matches happened in high summer. Rackard remembers the debate when the 1958 league final received a ringing accolade.
"John D Hickey (GAA correspondent of the Irish Independent) said the Wexford-Limerick National League final was the greatest game ever played. I'd say that was an exaggeration but he clarified the point by saying the best game didn't have to be between the best two teams."
Griffin was at the match but doesn't offer a judgment on its technical merits. "I was a child at that. It was an incredible game. John D Hickey said it was the greatest game ever. They were rebuilding the Hogan Stand at that time and I remember a big crane and Jim Morrissey out near it, 60 or 70 yards from goal, hitting a point."
For all the awareness of its past, hurling generally doesn't slip into the trap of automatically assuming the old days to have been the best. Ger Loughnane once recalled how unimpressed his son was by what he himself remembered as one of the best All-Irelands, the 1966 meeting between Cork and Kilkenny.
Broadcast during the All-Ireland Gold series on TnaG (now TG4), the match hadn't aged well. But it was of its time, just as this weekend's matches must be judged first by contemporary standards.
Lack of film footage has to an extent protected the reputations of players and matches before the advent of RTÉ, but Séamus J King has some rare evidence and says: "I've a video with highlights of the All-Ireland finals 1952-67 and some of them were so bad you wouldn't get it in a junior match - players pulling on balls and missing, that sort of thing."
"There's a tendency to say hurling was better in the old days," says Liam Griffin, "but video evidence suggests that it was played at a much slower pace. We thought it was lightning-quick but fitness regimes have changed and the game is now played at a faster pace. It doesn't mean it's better - players from long ago would be as fit if they were hurling now - but it doesn't mean it's worse."
