There must be an explanation. Keep thinking. Clare hurled Cork up a stick for long passages of this match and in more than an hour they trailed for a minute. Four-fifths of their scores came from play, many of them beauties. Most of Cork’s defenders were on the back foot and their attack was largely toothless. Does any of his make sense yet?
The bottom line is that Patrick Horgan scored 16 points, all but one of them from frees. Clare’s indiscipline was utterly destructive: they conceded 22 frees, 17 of them within Horgan’s prodigious range. He missed one. The other was parlayed into a smart pass to Tim O’Mahony, who ghosted down the flank in stoppage time to put Cork two points ahead. We