Donal Óg is driving hurling in the Banner backwards
THE irony this week is that Clare were moved to apologise for the bag of balls they dumped into a terrace rather than for the lack of ball they gave to their inside forward line.
If there was an apology owed it was not to the Cork management or Anthony Nash — although what occurred pre-match was a stain on sportsmanship — but to their supporters and, more importantly, to their players who have been coached into becoming diminished performers.
In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that it is Cork who should apologise to Clare for gifting them the coaching genius that is Donal Óg Cusack.
And to think that in Cork they feared that they had lost a guru when Donal Óg headed to Clare but, if they were crying into their pints on Leeside last Sunday night, then it was tears of laughter that were rolling. Am I being hard on Donal Óg? I don’t think so. When Davy Fitzgerald left this year the talk was that the Clare players would be released from the shackles of a system-based gameplan and play with the freedom that so many of them thrived on under the guidance of Donal Moloney and Gerry O’Connor when they were serial winning under 21s.
And yet you can hardly tell the two regimes apart and Donal Óg is the common denominator, still preaching a game plan that seeks to compromise the beauty of the game he coaches, rather than embrace it.
Ultimately it is Moloney and O’Connor’s failure and they have to take responsibility, but it is Cusack’s personality and his philosophy that continues to shine through.
One of Donal O’Grady’s disciples, in one way it is understandable why he would be in thrall to the notion that a ball in the hand is worth two in the air given the double All-Ireland success he enjoyed playing to that template.
But, the thing is, that belongs to the past.
The great redeeming factor this decade is that, despite the obsession with tactical whiteboards, the All-Ireland winners have tended to keep it simple.
That includes Davy Fitzgerald in 2013 when — in the final — he bowed to a relatively orthodox set-up to provide us with an epic finale which reminded us of just how talented a group he had in his care.
To see how that group has become bowed in spirit and in body is an indictment of a coaching culture which has become infected with ego and arrogance.
It is no longer enough to coach basic skills and place optimum trust in the skill-level and intelligence of your players, because if you do that there is a danger that they may get the credit.
It is quite the achievement to get a player as good as Tony Kelly — who was the best hurler in the game when he was barely out of his teens — and coach him into mediocrity.
It is also bloody tragic. And don’t even try to tell me that he has somehow become a bad player overnight.
Go check him out last winter as he drove Ballyea to the most unlikely and thrilling of Munster club title wins; he was the player of 2013, sharp in movement, crisp in striking, stuck right in the heart of the game.
Compare that to the player so drained of confidence that he has managed just a single point from his last three penalty attempts and please explain to me how there can be such a difference.
Better still, let me explain. In Ballyea, he is recognised as a great player and that the collective will benefit by ensuring that he is not just on the ball as often as possible, but that he is trusted to do what his instinct tells him.
With Clare, he is another cog in the wheel, measured by what his GPS reading says and, most likely, how few times he gave the ball back to the opposition. God help us. It was astonishing to watch Clare pass the ball across the field last Sunday while the likes of Conor McGrath and Shane O’Donnell ran around inside in the knowledge that they would hardly feel the weight of a ball all day. How dispiriting must that be? How miserable must it be if you are Podge Collins, who returned to focus on his hurling but who will probably realise that things have become so rigid that football might offer him more of a chance to express his talent.
I feel like taking a shower after writing that sentence, but that is the truth.
Clare is a team going nowhere because they are playing to a game-plan that is a decade behind the time, one that is utterly redundant.
And if their management, and in particular their coach, cannot see that then they have no business being there.
Cusack’s tactics belong in the past