Cork boss Ronan McCarthy is not entertaining talk of moral victories ahead of Saturday’s Munster final with Kerry.
Cork haven’t beaten their greatest rivals in the Championship for seven years and the gap between them has yawned in recent years to the extent that Kerry’s 17-point victory in last year’s final was their biggest in the fixture since 1938.
Amid that backdrop, it was put to McCarthy that a respectable performance in defeat this time round may be somewhat bearable. His response was emphatic.
He said: “Let me put it this way – if we come off the field on Saturday night beaten by a point, will I feel any better than I did last year? No.
“There are no moral victories here, you either win it or you don’t win it and that’s it.”
McCarthy is more than satisfied that preparations are going well ahead of the game after Cork rounded out the League reasonably well despite suffering relegation, performed well in a number of challenge games, which included a win over Dublin, and then trounced Limerick in the Munster semi-final.
But then, he says, he was happy with the build-up to last year’s game too and that ended in humiliation.
“We were expecting to give them a close game,” he recalled.
“Last year’s game was a funny one. It was helter-skelter for 15 minutes, things kicking off everywhere. Then the game settled down and, to be fair to Kerry, they squeezed us and we couldn’t get our hands on the ball.
“You had a period of 15 minutes coming up to half-time where they owned the ball. They have quality up front, we have huge quality but if there’s only set of forwards getting their hands on the ball, there’s only outcome.
“Having thundered into the game at the start and done well, we found ourselves seven points down at half-time and then they got a goal early in the second half and the energy fell out of us a bit.
“I can’t say it’s not going to happen again but all the signs are that we’re going in the right direction. We’re certainly looking forward to the challenge.
“The gap isn’t as big as it looked that night but, look, that’s easy for me to say here, we’ve to go and see can we influence that on Saturday.”
Despite Kerry losing the League final to Mayo and labouring to victory over Clare, McCarthy insists that they remain as formidable as ever.
He added: “To be winning by 12 points early in the second half, to me, similar to our game, they had that game put to bed very early.
“Maybe people harped on the fact that Clare narrowed the gap but never to a point where Kerry were in danger so, look, they’ve real quality and that’s be acknowledged.
“I have felt for a long time that we have fantastic quality in our team, great players up front, a fantastic midfield but talk is cheap, we’ve got to go do it.
“We know what Kerry are going to bring and, look, there’s going to be periods of the game where they’re going to have periods of dominance and I expect that we’ll have periods that we’ll be on top.
“Hopefully we can make the most of our periods where we have the ball and show a little more resilience, dig in and be defensively more solid where Kerry are on top in periods of the game but, look, we’ll see.”
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