In July 2017, Cork and Limerick met in the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick in the Munster U21 final. Limerick were favourites, especially when they had a raft of players which had already played senior championship, but Cork came with everything they had and a gripping match went to the wire.
It wasn’t a classic but it was a taut and tactical arm-wrestle, that ebbed and flowed throughout. Limerick led by three points at the break but then went 18 minutes without a score in the second half as Cork desperately tried to get ahead, but couldn’t. The contest ended with Cork camped in the Limerick square trying to salvage the goal to bring the match to a replay.
Nobody knew it at the time but, looking back now, that match was a window into the future. When Cork and Limerick meet again in Sunday’s All-Ireland final, 18 of the players who featured in that U21 game look set to play some part.
The list of names underlines the quality of players involved in that U-21 final; Sean Finn, Kyle Hayes, Aaron Gillane, Cian Lynch; Barry Nash, Peter Casey, Tom Morrissey, Conor Boylan, Robbie Hanley (Limerick); Patrick Collins, Sean O’Donoghue, Mark Coleman, Shane Kingston, Declan Dalton, Robbie O’Flynn, Tim O’Mahony, Jack O’Connor, Conor Cahalane (Cork).
That number would have risen to 19 if Darragh Fitzgibbon, who played senior championship for Cork that summer, hadn’t missed out with injury. Seamus Flanagan, who has become a key player for Limerick now, was only a sub for that game.
When Cork and Limerick met in an All-Ireland senior semi-final just a year after that 2017 final, 16 of the above named players played that day. They were young but they were gifted and they reflected the glorious potential of Cork and Limerick’s future.
It also underlined how much the underage development work done by both counties was, and would, frame both of their futures. Of the Limerick starting team for Sunday, 11 have All-Ireland U-21 medals (from either 2015 or 2017, or both).
Of the Cork players which featured against Kilkenny two weeks ago, 11 played in either, or both, of the All-Ireland U-21 and U-20 final defeats to Tipperary in 2018 and 2019. Two more of those players who featured in that recent senior semi-final – Alan Connolly and Shane Barrett – are still U-20 but they couldn’t play in Wednesday night’s All-Ireland final against Galway because the rules wouldn’t allow them to play with both sides.
This Limerick group may have had the success that Cork haven’t but Cork have been building something with those younger players.
Even with those harrowing underage defeats (many of those players also lost the 2017 All-Ireland minor final to Galway), Cork were still prepared to invest huge faith in that emerging talent. In contrast, Jake Morris and Barry Hogan are the only players from those Tipp underage teams which beat Cork in those two All-Ireland finals to have established themselves as senior hurlers. A handful of more have featured but only sporadically.
In Kieran Kingston’s first term as Cork manager between 2016-’17, he handed debuts to Shane Kingston (his son), Mark Coleman and Darragh Fitzgibbon when they were still only 19 and had just finished their Leaving Cert in 2017.
After a difficult year in 2016, when Cork were hammered by Tipp before losing to Wexford in the qualifiers, Kingston knew that the team which reached the 2013 All-Ireland final needed to be broken up.
In his second coming as manager – he returned last year – Kingston was also clearly prepared to take a gamble on youth. He certainly has; 14 of the team which featured against Kilkenny are under 24. In either this term or Kingston’s first, 11 of those players were handed their championship debut by the manager.
The U-20 grade has become more important in gauging development and future progress to senior level, especially since minor level was reduced to U-17. And Cork have clearly been the standout team at this grade in the last five years, having contested the last four U-21/U-20 All-Ireland finals. If they had beaten Limerick in the 2017 Munster final, that would be five finals in-a-row.
Cork are favourites to win this year’s All-Ireland minor final on Saturday against Galway but Limerick have been the dominant minor team in Munster over the last decade, contesting seven finals between 2013-’20, winning four titles. Cork had a seriously fancied minor team last year but Limerick beat them in the provincial semi-final by 12 points.
Yet Cork’s overall numbers have been more impressive than Limerick across the board over the last five years. If you include the U17s and minors in 2017, which reached Munster and All-Ireland hurling finals in both grades, Cork have contested 15 marquee underage hurling finals (at U17, minor, U20 and U21) in the last five seasons. That’s 10 more than Limerick.
Winning the 2020 U-20 All-Ireland in July clearly lifted a cloud over Cork underage teams which was hanging over the county since their last All-Ireland underage title in 1998. And the players – at every underage level – are playing with the swagger and belief of Cork teams of the past.
Cork also have their identity back, which they had lost in the recent past. As Kingston has rebuilt the team, he has also returned Cork to their traditional values, and moulding them in all the true characteristics of Cork hurling.
Cork were always renowned as a goalscoring team but they had gone away from that tradition. Yet that’s back now; in the 2020 and 2021 leagues, Cork scored 19 more goals than they managed in the three previous league campaigns. Cork may have only scored seven goals in four games this summer but they are creating a huge volume of goalscoring chances. Cork will create goal chances again on Sunday but they will need to take them to beat Limerick.
Limerick are favourites but they also know that Cork are a team capable of causing them huge problems. And both sets of players know each other so well.
