18-07-2025
'Honour dwindles away': Cork and Tipp have gained something more valuable than a trophy in 2025
A FIRST CORK-Tipperary All-Ireland final and it's possible to overstate the gravity. You could fall into the trap of thinking whoever wins this will enjoy semi-permanent bragging rights, even in lean times.
Yet the game probably will be subsumed into history fast enough. Only when it has passed the realm of recent memory will we be able to judge its weight.
Cork could win on Sunday, only for Tipp to recover and win two in a row. Tipp could win and disappear. Cork might get over the line and have enough power and momentum to win three of the next five. Or both might not be seen at this stage of competition for years to come. We just don't know. Sometimes we think we do. We apply as much logic as we can to the facts at hand and look ahead, but the view is never clear. There are too many small and freakish events to come which will shape the future.
Who in 2005 could have imagined Cork still waiting for another All-Ireland? They'd just won back-to-back titles and the celebration was muted compared to 2004. This was a team which looked set to stick around at that level for another three to four years.
Seán Óg Ó hAilpín lifts the Liam MacCarthy in 2005. INPHO INPHO
Did anybody think in 2015 Kilkenny would be about to set out on their longest ever drought, having won 11 All-Irelands in the century to that point?
Or one that comes to mind is Meath's destruction of Kerry in the football semi-final of 2001, a 15-point rout. Kerry then won five All-Irelands that decade. Meath lost the final and have not been back in one since.
So we can never really tell, but we do have a better idea of what a lack of success does to people and places.
The last time Cork won the Liam MacCarthy Cup they were the designated European Capital of Culture. Ask most Cork now what they remember about the various artistic projects and performances of the time, and it's a fair bet many would think of Seán Óg Ó hAilpín driving a burning sliotar into the Lee.
Hurling is a sport, and in Cork, like in some other places, it's an expression of place and form of art. Success brings validation and happiness for a while. Absence of success becomes a collective yearning that is shared among the populace.
The majority of Cork's panel will have no memory of Cork last winning the All-Ireland in '05. Whole cycles of school kids have gone from junior infants to sixth class without the cup coming to their school. The thousands of teenagers following Cork all over the land have never seen Liam MacCarthy shining from an open top bus, crossing St Patrick's Bridge to wind its way to the Grand Parade.
And not to be morbid ahead of what is a happy occasion, but a lot of Cork supporters who celebrated in '05 are not around now. Should Cork win on Sunday then a lot of those in red will be thinking about them. The cup will do an extensive tour of schools and clubhouses when Cork end the wait, be that this year or another. But there will be another tour, a silent one, of the county's graveyards. Many of those fortunate enough to get access to the trophy for an hour will want to share it for a small moment with Cork supporters close to them who have passed on.
All of this adds to the collective longing and can contribute to the pressure on players to deliver. Though at least in the case of young athletes, most of them aren't acutely aware of mortality and the passage of time, which is as it should be and helps them to be in a suitable frame of mind for the task ahead.
Yet there is still considerable pressure, for Tipperary who know that the route back to this point is promised to nobody, and has been far more fraught than they would have imagined in 2019. And for Cork's players, who must decide whether to embrace or insulate themselves from the psychic energy of around half a million souls around them willing Liam MacCarthy back across the county border through their deeds.
Perhaps one way to diminish the pressure for supporters and especially players is to listen to Scottie Scheffler, who gave a fairly moving examination of the meaning of sport at the highest level this week. You'll have all heard what he said by now. Perhaps the most arresting line was in how achieving victory and attaining mastery of a sport 'is not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart'.
Scheffler went on: 'There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life, and you get there, you get to No 1 in the world, and they're like what's the point?'
Advertisement
Scottie Scheffler: 'What's the point?' Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
Most of us cannot relate to getting to No 1 and finding it an anticlimax, but we've probably all had the experience of victory and know that nothing changes substantially.
We, the suffering Tottenham fans, had a trophy win last season. The wait for Spurs supporters was not quite as long as Cork's pause for Liam MacCarthy, but there is a vital difference. In Cork there is a general feeling, based on fair evidence, that the wait will end at some point. There was no such assurance for Spurs fans.
I've rarely experienced anything like the sporting joy of that hour or so after the whistle in May; so delighted for my son who has never seen this, for my dad who has followed the club devoutly since the 1950s, for all the friends I've gained through Spurs who have held the line. And, if I'm honest, in that moment I was mainly ecstatic for little old me.
The elation carries into the next day but it subsides quickly enough. Life, as Scottie says, goes on. The good things in your life are still good and the troubles remain. Had Spurs lost the final to Man United, I'd still be a fan, still get frustrated by the way the club is run, but still be grateful to belong to this team which goes back through the generations in my family.
And a trophy? What really is it anyway? Probably something that's great to win if it comes as a result of you going about your business in a passionate, conscientious manner. But it can't be what it's all about.
Earlier in the week, before Scheffler climbed onto the mount, I'd been grappling with the idea that maybe Sunday's final doesn't matter as much as I thought. In middle age, I've taken to leafing through Lau Tzu's Tao Te Ching at bedtime. It beats scrolling on Instagram and being told for how long you must intermittently fast to alter the midriff.
Now, I'm not nearly spiritually evolved enough to understand the text fully. Most of the lines I read a second and third time and still it doesn't compute. The bits that land do so in a sporting context, which I'm not sure was the intended meaning all of those thousands of years ago. But you can only approach things from where you're at.
'Honour,' says Lao Tzu, 'is a contagion deep as fear'.
Why?
'Honour always dwindles away,
So earning it fills us with fear
And losing it fills us with fear.'
The primary feeling for most of the winners on Sunday will be relief. The aftermath will soon turn to good teams winning one, and great teams winning two. Or three. As Scottie put it, 'You won two majors this year; how important is it for you to win the FedEx Cup play-offs?'.
Your glory will never be enough. On the face of it that can be quite a nihilistic message. In reality it is anything but. Let's continue our journey through the Tao Te Ching with Ireland's least suitable guide.
'When all beneath heaven is your self in renown
You trust yourself to all beneath heaven,
And when all beneath heaven is your self in love
You dwell throughout all beneath heaven.'
There is a reason the hurling teams of Cork, for the past couple of years, and Tipp, more recently, have connected with their people.
Yes, the good results help: who doesn't like winning?
Far more important is the way they have played the game, the way they have made supporters feel.
Cork have embodied the best parts of their heritage and added to it. They are modern and finely conditioned but have played with scintillating ambition and verve, taken risks, moved the ball forward swiftly and attacked the goal. In their good moments, which have far outnumbered the bad, they play with a lack of fear; with a desire to channel the energy of themselves and their huge support into a show of fast, menacing hurling. They also showed grit and a relentless capacity to give their all to every play during the Munster final against Limerick.
People talk about Cork having to win this one. Well, the game is more popular than ever on Leeside if you go by the sheer amount of kids playing the game and following the county side. The way this team and their great manager have carried themselves has a lot to do with that.
Cork and Tipp players scramble for the ball during the Munster round robin game in April. James Crombie / INPHO James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
From the first month of the year to now, Tipperary have approached the game with integrity. The way they went to the well against Clare and Kilkenny and eked out results which seemed to be slipping away was impressive and a reflection of the honesty of effort that characterised their year. Even in the few low moments they persevered. They could have checked out against Cork in the second half of the league final, or when down to 14 in the Munster round robin but they kept playing. This attitude, allied to the stellar array of talent they possess, especially in attack, makes them the team they are now: industrious, inventive, resolute, brilliantly intuitive in front of goal.
On a fundamental level, both teams seem decent people who know what it's all about. Before the league game between the pair in February, we ambled out of the Supermacs on Liberty Square just as the Tipperary bus rolled past. You could see the game faces go by, but the boys with us were too young to understand that and waved, enthusiastic and earnest, to the players. They nearly all gave a wave or a nod back, and after the game the players were patient and good natured with hundreds of young fans looking for pictures and autographs.
Sports science must have a lot to do with how Patrick Horgan can perform at the level he does at 37. Best practice definitely isn't to stand still on a freezing pitch for ages on a winter's night. The scrum around him, as ever, was colossal but he stood there, cooling rapidly after a loss, and signed hurley after sliotar.
Pretty much all players in all teams are generous this way, even if few are as in demand as Horgan. They know not long ago they were that kid. In the shortest time they'll be back in the stand while the next generation takes their place. As Gary Barlow and the boys came to accept, someday soon this will all be someone else's dream.
If Sunday is truly important it is as the latest piece in the mosaic of Cork v Tipp games that goes back almost 140 years. This is the thing which endures, which lasts beyond any title or trinket.
Tim Gallwey wrote in the Inner Game of Tennis, perhaps the best of all sports psychology books, that 'true competition is identical with true cooperation'.
Cork and Tipperary as hurling counties have reached the levels they have because they have drawn it out of each other, asked questions, posed physical challenges, bettered each other with stunning feats of skill and nerve under pressure. Each is richer for the other's presence.
It could well be a close contest on Sunday and in that event it may pivot on a refereeing decision or a mistake from a player at the wrong moment.
Hopefully it's not that, and both sides reach the necessary level of relaxed concentration to perform to their true level. If that happens the game will be full of wonder – heartbreaking for a time for the team that loses but in the end something real and beautiful for the masses.
Victory's honour will surely dwindle away but the game will stick around. That's where love dwells. The arc, strike and flight towards some kind of fulfilling life.
