THAT THE CORK hurlers are the last of all counties to start their Championship this weekend plays into their consideration as something of a wildcard.
Waterford and Tipperary, their first two visitors to Páirc Uí Chaoimh in the space of seven days, will arrive with both a sense of trepidation and opportunity.
Their opponents are a team that can both explode into an All-Ireland final, as in 2021, or suffer a self-inflicted fade-out, as in 2022.
There’s still a good half of the team that twice drew with Limerick in 2018 and beat them in 2019 in position.
They’ve lost little flair since then but those who have left were imbued with a certain warrior spirit; Colm Spillane, Daniel Kearney, Bill Cooper, Eoin Cadogan, Mark Ellis, Christopher Joyce, and Anthony Nash among them.
They may not have been the stuff of breathless headlines or individual awards (bar Nash) but for years they were the grease that kept the wheel turning, albeit never quite reaching that final destination.
Newly installed manager Pat Ryan has been prioritising a reconnection with some of those first principles.
Forget Corkness, Ryan wants more hardness.
In his own words, Cork hurling has placed a value on skill and speed and nice hurlers too often at the expense of those other fundamental attributes.
“It’s very obvious we need to get more physical in what we’re doing,” he said earlier this year, albeit adding, “but we can’t go away from what we’re good at too.”
As Cork U20 manager, he led the Rebels to back-to-back All-Irelands in 2020 and ’21, an achievement which puts him in a similar category to Liam Cahill with Tipperary.
The difference there is that Cahill’s teams of 2018 (U21) and ’19 have a handful of extra years’ maturity in their conditioning and hurling.
The majority of Cork’s most frequently used players in the League came from those teams: Tommy O’Connell, Brian Roche, Eoin Roche, Ciarán Joyce, Ethan Twomey, Pádraig Power, Brian Hayes, Eoin Downey, and Cormac O’Brien all played more than half of the possible minutes this spring.
Tricky, then, to build in extra physicality when most of your additions may require some more sunlight to grow to full bloom.
Consistency is another metric of progress. For Cork, that has been tricky to find. World-beaters one day, whipping boys the next.
They lost their first two Championship outings, against Limerick and Clare, last year before finding something when in do-or-die territory away to Waterford.
“It wasn’t acceptable to perform like that on those two days but I think the team showed what they were capable of that day below in Waterford when the backs were to the wall,” said Ryan last December.
“But we just need more of a consistent performance and it’s not relying on a backs-to-the-wall mentality to perform like that. That Waterford performance needs to be the way we should be playing all the time.”
For now, all we have is early-season form to go on. There were hints of added steel in how they ground out five results (four wins, one draw) from losing positions with stoppage-time scores between the Allianz and Munster Hurling Leagues.
But equally, for all Ryan had emphasised their intentions of targeting a League title, they offered little in losing their semi-final to Kilkenny.
Their cloak of mystery will be shed on Sunday. Have Ryan’s lessons taken hold during their five weeks out of the spotlight? Or will old failings rear their head in the end?