“But the Square in Thurles was like nothing I’d ever seen. Full on. The Cork support out in force, shaking the bus as though we were Fenerbahçe going to a derby in Turkey. We were laughing our heads off, some Cork lad with a beer in one hand and giving you the finger with the other: how could you not laugh?” – Ken McGrath, ‘Hand On Heart.’
RONAN CURRAN ALWAYS had his preferred spot in the Semple Stadium dressing rooms.
Right next to Ben O’Connor on the section of the bench that was closest to the showers, was where you’d find him on Munster championship days.
The pair had a similar arrangement for training sessions in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, and they carried that sense of familiarity around with them to different grounds throughout their careers.
Paul Flynn found solace in being one of the last players to leave the dressing room, whenever he was on Waterford duty.
While anticipation was simmering overhead among the spectators, the players busied themselves with rituals like these until the battle cry came.
Clashes between Cork and Waterford during the early 2000′s, culminated in a seven-year rivalry that was laced with skill, pace and passionate hurling.
Curran’s abiding memory of those battles against Waterford, was the speed of the games under a scorching sun.
“I said it to someone recently that the main thing I remember from those matches was the speed of them,” he told The42.
It was so hot, the ball was so bouncy because the ground was so hard and the speed of the game was just unnatural.
“You’re trying to catch your breath from five minutes in and you’re nearly hoping for a break in the play in a lot of it. Those games were all go, there was no stop-start in them.”
In 2004, the sides contested the Munster final for a second consecutive year with Cork having prevailed on the previous occasion.
This match would later be remembered as one of the greatest games in the modern era of championship hurling.
Even Sunday Game football analyst Colm O’Rourke felt compelled to go out for a few pucks on the Semple Stadium grass after the game.
It was a day when Dan Shanahan and Joe Deane put on a exhibition of scoring excellence in the first half. It was a day where a hook on Eoin Kelly would spur him on to run in along the endline and score a vital goal.
Ben O’Connor terrorised the Waterford defence with his immaculate stick work, and Ken McGrath settled the tie with a match-winning catch.
John Mullane walking off the pitch, eyes closed, and pressing his hurl against the back of his neck after a moment of indiscipline, is an enduring image from the game.
Curran scored a point from centre-back in that final, while Flynn — who was taken off in the previous games against Clare and Tipperary — pocketed 1-07 in a man-of-the-match performance.
This is their story.
Thurles arrivals
Before decamping to the dressing rooms to begin their routines, the players were briefly immersed in the colour and chaos of the Munster final day crowd.
Both sets of players disembarked the team buses to swathes of fans lining a path to the dressing-rooms, offering encouraging words as they passed by.
Flynn admits that his first experience of that pre-match fanfare was somewhat unnerving, but he learned to embrace it.
By 2004, it was a familiar part of his match-day routine.
That day in particular was hot,” he told The42. ”I’d say there was a few bevvies taken alright (among fans). I remember the bus stopping at one stage and people were rocking it, they were hitting the side of the bus. It was a unique experience to drive through a full square in Thurles.”
Curran also enjoyed that sense of closeness with the fans. It reinforced a sense of purpose in him about what the players were doing and why they were doing it.
“Some people wouldn’t have but I liked it because it really got you up for the game.
You realised that there was so many people coming to watch the game and you’d see a lot of parents with their young kids and you’d realise that there’s a responsibility on you as well that these young fellas are looking up to you.
“They might want to play in years to come and you’re lucky enough (to do it). That’s all we were, we were lucky enough to play for Cork.
“We trained hard to get there, we trained hard while we were with them but you’re still only passing on the jersey.
Going through Thurles and seeing all the people and the excitement on their faces, really got you going for the game and brought it home how much it meant to people.
Cork’s perfect start
A few weeks before that Munster final, Garvan McCarthy of the Sarsfields club was drafted into the Cork senior panel.
To see whether he could cut the mustard alongside the regulars on the starting team, he was selected to play in a challenge match against Clare.
Manager Dónal O’Grady was impressed with what he saw, and Curran’s account of McCarthy’s performance was that he “caught the world of ball.”
His efforts were rewarded when he was named to start on the Cork half-forward line for the game against Waterford, and within three minutes of the throw-in, the championship debutante had a goal to his credit.
A Cork attack found Ben O’Connor on the wing, who slipped a pass deeper into Waterford territory.
The ball deflected off a Cork hurl into a crowd of players, all rushing in to try and gain possession.
After bouncing off a few bodies, the ball popped up into the air like the inverse of a pinball machine and floated over McCarthy’s helmet.
The newcomer struck it mid-air and whipped the ball towards the Waterford goal.
An audacious strike from distance perhaps, but the bounce of it managed to deceive goalkeeper Stephen Brenner and rolled into the net.
McCarthy didn’t go on to earn the kind of acclaim that Joe Deane or Brian Corcoran enjoyed while playing in the Cork forward line. And he suffered from back problems later in his career according to Curran.
But he’ll always have Thurles.
Losing John Mullane and the emergence of Paul Flynn
Cork were three points clear at half-time and had the luxury of playing with the wind in the second half to look forward to.
Goals from Eoin Kelly and Dan Shanahan were keeping them abreast of Cork, and Waterford were in need of leaders to keep the game from slipping out of reach.
In the early moments of the second half, it looked as though John Mullane would be their saviour.
Two minutes later, he was walking off the pitch to the chorus of cheers from the Cork supporters.
He had just hit his second point of the game, when Cork defender Brian Murphy was seen cradling his face on the ground.
Cork players immediately converged on Mullane in outrage, while referee Seanie McMahon sought the advice of his umpires before dismissing Mullane with a red card.
Flynn didn’t see the incident but was loyal to his teammate.
“I remember Ken (McGrath) had the ball, we were awarded a free in our own half-back line. I think, strangely, I made a run and I heard the crowd.
“I turned around and by the time I turned around, I hadn’t seen much but without seeing it, you defend your teammate straight away.
“I remember some of the Cork players telling the umpire what he had done and myself and Dan (Shanahan) were there saying, “no, he didn’t, he didn’t.”
“It was a moment of madness. He’d often say that he got out of jail by us winning the match.
“It was the All-Ireland semi-final a few weeks later (against Kilkenny) that the severity of the penalty on the team was there to be seen.”
Two points up and now with an extra man, Cork looked to be headed for Munster honours yet again.
An unlikely goal
The referee telling Paul Flynn to take it back just a little bit. The last time a referee told a player to take it back for a free, it dropped into the goal. – Ger Canning, GAA commentator.
It wasn’t something they laboured on, but the Cork players were aware of Paul Flynn’s free-taking abilities.
They knew that he could put an unpredictable spin on the ball, and after the 2004 Munster final, they learned the true cost of neglecting to thoroughly prepare for that eventuality.
At the turn of the 50th minute, Waterford were trailing by two points when they were awarded a free for a foul on Shanahan.
It was inside the Cork 45-metre line, and suitably positioned for an attempt at a point that would reduce the deficit to one score.
The offender, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, was quietly protesting to the referee about the decision while Flynn prepared to stand over the ball.
Flynn sensed that Waterford were drifting out of contention and felt that he needed to drive for more than just a point.
Curran, along with Ó hAilpín, Diarmuid O’Sullivan and Donal Óg Cusack were all marshaling the Cork goalmouth, but the Ballygunner man had an ace card to play.
“It was something that we used to mess around with at training — trying to hit the crossbar and so on. That’s kind of what I tried. I was hoping it would go under obviously, and worse case scenario, it might go over.
I tried it plenty of times but it only came off three times. That happened to be the one time where there was people at the match.
“It was an opportunity, we were two points down. The game was kind of slipping from us at that stage and that kind of rejuvenated everybody. 20 minutes to go, the crowd was back alive.”
Flynn angled the shot to ensure it had enough air to evade a touch from a Cork hurl, while applying enough dip to send it firing into the net.
Crucially, it gave Waterford the lead for the first time in the game.
Cork’s misfortunes and Waterford’s opportunity
Reflecting on it all now, Curran concedes that Cork could have brought a bigger fight to the game when they had the numerical advantage in the second half.
Diarmuid O’Sullivan was their spare player after Mullane was sent off, a role which Curran feels didn’t compliment O’Sullivan’s usual game.
“If we look back on it, we handled it badly. Diarmuid obviously was a great marker around the edge of the square but we probably could have had someone who was moving around the pitch like John (Gardiner) or myself or Sean Og.
“It wasn’t really about how we dealt with that, it was that we kind of relaxed a bit. You don’t think you are but looking back we could have been going harder. Just sometimes, that happens.
“It was a hot day and you don’t mean to, but it does get into your head.”
Cork had their chances to clinch the tie.
An almost certain goal at the death was halted by the intervention of Waterford full-back James Murray, who flicked the ball away at the pivotal moment as Jerry O’Connor was steaming through the centre.
Timmy McCarthy had a chance to level the game with a point at the end, but was unlucky to see his effort sail wide.
Ultimately however, it was Waterford’s resilience that earned them the victory.
For every stride Cork made through points, Waterford salvaged a momentum-swinging goal from somewhere to keep them in the game.
“In some games,” Curran adds, “there’s always one point where you reckon, “we have these guys now.” There was around three of those (moments) in the first half and they kept on coming back, and they kept on switching.
In 2003 going into 2004, the Waterford forwards’ movement was unbelievable. They were the one team really working on movement and you could end up anywhere on the pitch whereas if you were playing Tipperary or even Kilkenny back then, you would have been in your spot for the game.
“With Waterford, you could end up in corner-back for a while or full-back. They had that down to a tee, which made it very hard to play against. You had to be ready for whoever you ended up on.”
Munster mystique
John McEnroe once said that Wimbledon is a prestigious tournament because everybody says it is.
In ways, Munster hurling can be characterised in a similar way. There’s a universal acceptance that the competition has a long-standing prestige and that message lives on through the generations.
The games don’t always have to be epics for fans to be intrigued, as was evidenced in last year’s series of uninspiring Munster hurling games.
But the possibility of a classic encounter unfolding before us keeps fans coming back every year without any need for persuasion.
Flynn is heading off to Thurles today to watch his county renew rivalries with Cork in the Munster SFC semi-final.
He’s been making that trip to the Mecca of hurling in the south since he was a child, and he has an intimate understanding of why the competition remains so special.
“It’s the tribalism of it.
“You have traditionally Cork — the kingpins — Tipperary and then the rest trying to get into that elite company.
“It’s the passion — especially with a knockout — the championship victory brings to first of all the team, the momentum and the belief.
For me, it was going off as a 10 or 12-year-old with sandwiches and flasks of tea. Crying coming home and there’s people before me that did that with their parents and people before them that did it with their parents.
“People from other counties on the road to Thurles that park in a certain lay-by with egg and onion sandwiches.
Everyone has a ritual when they go to a Munster championship game, it’s nearly passed down father to son and mother to daughter. That’s what it is and with the promise of it being very competitive, probably no more so than now.
“I think if you win Munster, it’s a serious notch on your belt.”
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