Back to the Old House

“I would rather not go back to the Old House. There’s too many bad memories. Too many bad memories”

– Back to the Old House, The Smiths

They say you have to lose one to win one. It’s the kind of comforting maxim you cling to with white-knuckled hope, like so many of us did twelve months ago, grasping for something, anything, to carry us through hurling’s long, barren winter. But like most sayings, it doesn’t always hold up. Limerick never had to lose one. Then again, maybe their luckless predecessors did enough of that for all of them. Sometimes, a team can just arrive, fully formed, and win. We did it in ’99. And we’ve learned that losing doesn’t guarantee anything either. Pain has never been a passport to glory. In 2013, both teams came from nowhere. Clare lifted the cup. We walked away with the weight of defeat. And kept carrying it. Still, on the eve of another All-Ireland final, you try to believe. You try to tell yourself that last year’s heartbreak had a purpose. That suffering was a step. That this is how it’s always been. As it was in 2003. Those bad memories are just the price you have to pay sometimes. So we go back to the Old House…

1999. 2003. 2013. We’re reeling off all the classics today. We list them like sacred texts because, while this final may offer something new – an unprecedented chapter between two storied counties – it can’t help but pull us back into the past too. Now, you can break it down scientifically if you want. Go all cold, clinical, data-driven and to hell with history. There’s no shortage of excellent journalists and analysts going down that route, armed with stats and systems with far greater expertise and insight than you’re likely to find here. So, by all means, dive in. You’ll probably like what you hear. Most of them will tell you Cork should win. Maybe even with a bit to spare. They’ll say that Cork have the pace, the power and of course, the pain of last year’s defeat. A potent cocktail, no doubt. They’ll point to Cork’s recent dominance over Tipperary too. A record that, despite some very obvious caveats, still makes for reassuring reading.

But what the numbers won’t tell you is what’s gone before. What they won’t tell you is that the only Celtic Crosses attained between the two camps, fifteen in total, reside north of the Galtee Mountains. Liam Cahill knows this, as I’m sure his players do too. The Tipperary dressing room will be buoyed by the fact that they have the players that have actually gone and done it. And until these Cork players actually go and do it, they will remain manacled by the past. It’s that simple. So naturally, that’s where the mind drifts. To the past. It’s weeks like these when we find ourselves drawn to the games that came before; sifting through them for patterns, signs, omens. Inevitably, it’s history, flawed and fickle as it is, that becomes the lens through which we try to glimpse the future.

We think back to the 2013 final, as is often the case, a reminder of how Cork, second best for long stretches, came agonisingly close to snatching it at the end. Or to the replay, where once again, the game was in the fire right up until the final embers despite Clare’s dominance. Those games serve as a warning that no matter how strong a team looks, no matter which way the wind is blowing, everything can change in a moment. Games turn on goals, often sudden and unpredictable, often from the most unlikely sources. Twelve years ago, it was, or nearly was, Pa Cronin. Then Stephen Moylan. Twelve days ago, it was Oisín O’Donoghue, who somehow wriggled free to get a shot off from a blur of ash and bodies. Whatever else, this final should bring goals. Plenty of them. And with goals comes chaos, the kind no form guide or betting line can truly account for. Which is why any logic pointing to a Cork win must be handled with care.

We think of the Cork–Tipperary clashes of old. For supporters of a certain vintage, the rivalry lives vividly in tales of Ring and Mick ‘Tough’ Barry, in stories of goalkeepers being accosted down in Killarney, or in the retelling of Nicky English’s prowess with his instep. But for younger generations, your thirty-something year olds, they remain encased in folklore. Echoes of a past they never saw. As Donal Óg Cusack put it in his autobiography: “If we have a modern history with Tipp, it’s that we never really feared them.” We never did. And you’d imagine the feeling was mutual. Tomorrow’s final marks a rare collision between the two in the All-Ireland series (tomorrow will be just the fifth)as oddly enough, for most of the past thirty years, when one has been strong, the other has struggled. When one has risen, the other has receded. The kind of uneasy equilibrium that has kept the hurling world spinning on its axis, tilted enough to let others step in and take their turn.

So instead, our memories aren’t of two heavyweights clashing under the brightest lights, but of quieter, less-celebrated battles, those off-Broadway affairs, the true weight of which was felt only by those most intimately connected. We think of 2008, for instance, when a few hundred fans spilled onto the grass at the Blackrock End due to overcrowding, and Tipperary made history by ending an 85-year wait for a championship win on Leeside. A day when Cork’s attack misfired so badly that five of the starting six forwards were hauled off and a young, precocious talent in a blue helmet made his intercounty debut as a late substitute for Niall McCarthy. We mightn’t have known it then but it wasn’t just the match that needed saving. It was the very fabric of Cork hurling itself.

Or we cast our minds to 2017, when Cork toppled Tipp in the opening round of the Munster championship, the final version of the knockout format before the round-robin era began. Cork fans poured down from the terraces again that day, this time in sheer jubilation, a release of joy that showed just how much it meant. For Cork hurling. For the players. For what was beginning. This came less than a year, you might recall, after that defeat to Wexford above in a half-empty Semple Stadium that brought the curtain down on Cork’s annus horribilis. Mark Coleman, Darragh Fitzgibbon, Shane Kingston and Luke Meade all made their championship debuts against Tipp that day in ’17. Eight seasons on and they, along with Hoggy, are still trying to finish what they started.

If we’re to make history this weekend, it’s only because we’ve been made by it. Scarred by it, shaped by it. The wins and the wounds alike. So let that old wisdom hold true, just this once. You’ve got to lose one to win one. Tipperary have to lose. We have to win. We simply have to win. Tomorrow evening, the finest Smiths tribute act around, These Charming Men, will take to the stage at Cyprus Avenue. An appropriate prelude perhaps to our own journey back to the Old House, a fitting nod to the evocation of the past and the inescapable nostalgia that permeates our thoughts and dreams.

Because we haven’t had a dream in a long time. So please, please, please – let me, let me, let me – let me get what I want. This time.

Up the Rebels