We sauntered down to Mulligans yesterday evening to get the thoughts of our columnist Sean Óg Ó Kneejerk. So depressed was he by events in Thurles that it was initially hard to get him to offer anything. Eventually, after some skilful prodding we got him to open up.
Before we begin, it's important to remember that Sean Óg can offer little in the way of detailed analysis of what went on in Thurles yesterday and that's not just because he's disinclined to do that sort of thing anyway.
For one thing, Sean Óg didn't watch most of the second half of the Tipperary-Cork game.
At 40 minutes into the match, he successfully persuaded the barman to switch over to Irish TV which at the time was showing a rerun of the 1976 All-Ireland final between Cork and Wexford, in which a Cork forward line which included Jimmy Barry Murphy and Ray Cummins racked up a score of 2-21.
All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable thirty minutes.
Which is more than can be said for his experience watching the first half of yesterday's game, which was as grim a 35 minutes as he's ever endured in his 67 years on the planet to date. Possibly, the grimmest.
Though he would never describe himself as such, Sean Óg is an uncompromising purist and as such the two teams he reveres above all others are the Kerry footballers and the Cork hurlers.
And he treats yesterday's spectacle as a matter of quite some gravity and something approaching a national scandal. In fact, he has been far less exercised about the genuine scandals that have blighted the Irish state in his lifetime.
Going by Sean Óg's retelling, so many deceased old timers were turning in the graves yesterday, it's a wonder that there wasn't at least a size 7 magnitude earthquake hitting Ireland around 6.00pm on Sunday evening.
They brought shame on the Cork jersey. That wasn't Cork that was playing yesterday. That was fifteen imposters in red shirts.
Any man who sends out a Cork team to play like that needs to be arrested and stand trial in front of an international tribunal in the Hague. Why do we have these institutions if we're not going to prosecute real crimes like the one we witnessed in Thurles yesterday?
They should be sitting there behind a pane of glass like Milosevic was, forced to answer questions to a foreign judge, explaining what they did and why.
Playing a bloody sweeper when you're eight points down with ten minutes left! I don't know what these geniuses do be thinking at all. Cork need a goal and there's an extra man plonked in front of the full-back line. I mean for fuck sake... (at this point, Sean Óg banged the table so hard that it tilted miles up in the air causing the contents of my pint glass to land in the hair of the lady seated to my left. Sean Óg's anger at Cork's display was transcending language at this point).
They need to sack this manager immediately and bring back the Canon before any more damage is done.
At this point, I was obliged to point out that Canon Michael O'Brien sadly passed on a couple of years back, information that seemed to shake Sean Óg's composure, so much so that he needed a couple of minutes to regather his thoughts.
At the very least, it's time to bring Jimmy Barry back. They were wrong to get rid of him in the first place. He would never have presided over a display like that. I know he played a sweeper against Galway last year but JBM didn't make that call. That was prevailed upon him by the backroom boys who were panicking. Jimmy's only fault was that he listened to those guys. They should have left him to make the decisions on his own.
I remember the day Christy Ring died. The Taoiseach found out from the little Echo boy in the street. I remember catching the news on the radio off Mick Dunne. It was a sorrowful day.
Well, I'd tell ya, you'd nearly be glad of it that he wasn't around to see what went on yesterday. It goes without saying that he was turning over in his grave. I'd say the graveyard below in Cloyne was the scene of so much tossing and turning that the ground above was probably shaking. It's a wonder there wasn't a bloody earthquake down in Cork.
And I'd say the Canon was turning in his grave, and I'd say Jack Lynch was turning over in his grave, and I'd say Bertie Troy was turning in his grave (he went to list out the names of at least 14 deceased Cork hurlers all of whom were turning over in their graves yesterday evening).
As we noted last week, over the past thirteen years, Sean Óg has predicted the death of Gaelic football with the same regularity that Baptist preachers in the US have predicted the end of the world. Hurling has been spared these dire predictions. Until 2016.
This is end times stuff. I never thought I'd see the like, a Cork team going out and playing like that. A Waterford team or a Clare team, maybe, even a Galway team, but not Cork, never Cork. This is the end of hurling as we have known it. I heard Babs Keating talking about the game being gone on Newstalk last year and he's dead right. There was a man now, Babs Keating... (there followed a glowing fifteen-minute tribute to Babs, his talents and, above all, his unimpeachable manliness). We need to get back to what we lost. You know who has to bear a lot of the blame for this? All those strikers. Couldn't train unless they got all this free gear and all that shite. You think Ringy had any of that stuff? He did in his hole. He didn't fuckin' whinge about it though, did he? Not a bit of it.
Such was the extent of Sean Óg's anger at Cork, that it was difficult to get him onto the other games this weekend. Suffice to say, he has never held the Kildare footballers in high regard and the weekend's events haven't significantly altered this prejudice. While he is fond of Liam Dunne and his no-nonsense approach, he reckons Wexford hurling is as good as dead if they don't keep going.
That's the GAA for ya. 13,000 people inside in Croke Park. You could hear the lads shouting on the pitch. You could hear of the boing off Ryan O'Dwyer's weird hurl - what the fuck is he at by the way, with that thing? - it was an embarrassment to the association is what it was. If you had that down in Wexford Park, you'd get a mighty, noisy crowd and probably a good game too.
I feel sorry for Liam Dunne. He was hard man in his day, he must get sick looking at these soft c***s and their fuckin' messing. He's as well off out of there for his own sake, before those lads drive him demented.
As for Kildare, they win to die another day. Two points in the second half and still winning a match, I don't even know where to begin. They've a bloody strength and conditioning coach as manager, spouting all this new age shite at them. Should have gone for Glen Ryan and they wouldn't be crawling past Division 4 opposition by a point.
Sean Óg couldn't let an evening go by without taking a swipe at the state broadcaster.
Poor old Leitrim playing against Roscommon, biggest game they have all year and RTE don't even bother sending a commentator down. They get some reporter down to give us some piddling two-minute report in the past tense like it's on the fucking Six One News or something!
That's the greatest disrespect you'll see in the world today. I honestly can't imagine anything more disrespectful.
I tell ya, Mickey Harte is right about them RTE lads. If I was Leitrim player I'd be boycotting them fellas. Blanking whatever sappy little furry mic holder they sent down to Carrick for the annual bateing. I'm surprised they can even find the place.
Sure, fuckit, Leitrim should think about boycotting the rest of the championship, if anyone would notice.
(Sean Óg Ó Kneejerk was in conversation with Conor Neville)
