IN THE 55th minute of Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final, Patrick  Cronin fielded a high ball inside the 13m line, turned and drove it over the bar.
At that stage of the game, Cork desperately needed a goal.  It was the only clear-cut goal chance Cork created in the match and when the opportunity went, so did Cork’s chance of winning.
The ball that Cronin initially won was all the more precious when you consider how hard it was for Cork to even get their hands on the ball. In the opening 20 minutes of the second half, the Cork forwards had the ball in their hands on just four occasions.
With that rate of possession, Cork were never going to buck the trend of the match without at least two goals. Once Galway changed their tactics at half-time and retreated more bodies into their defence, the oxygen was completely sucked from Cork’s lungs.
In the first half, the Cork midfielders and forwards made a combined total of 52 plays.  After the break, their front eight made just 31 plays.
Once the Galway half-back line got a grip on the game, Cork couldn’t cope.
The Cork half-forward line had made just 17 plays in the first half.  After the break, they made just six.
In the modern game, the half-forward line has become the most important line on the field.  Yet for the second game in succession, the entire half-forward line was taken off.
Although Cork had two experienced players to bring in – Niall McCarthy and Cathal Naughton – they both made just three plays between them. 
The problems which had been highlighted before the game – difficulties winning enough possession from puck-outs and failure to get the full-forward line into the game – resurfaced once more.
After Cork had won the puck-out stat 17-16 in the first half, Galway turned it on its head after the break when winning that statistical category 18-9.  Crucially though, as in the Waterford game, 12 of those 18 were Cork puck-outs.
In the first half, the Cork full-forward line made 15 plays. Although Luke O’Farrell didn’t make his first play until the half hour mark, he finished the half strongly with four plays.
He scored one point but it could have been three because he hit two wides.
Patrick Horgan struggled to get into the game, making four plays, but Paudie O’Sullivan was brilliant from seven plays. As well as scoring three points, he set up another score, and was also involved in creating another scoring chance.
After the break though, the full-forward line – including Stephen Moylan — made a combined total of just nine plays.
The stats prior to the game showed that Cork needed to be more direct to get the ball into the full-forward line and they certainly were far more direct than usual. In the first half, they played 18 balls into their forwards and won eight.
Yet once Galway locked down space at the back, Cork panicked and began lorrying long ball into an attack that was never equipped to win that kind of possession.
When running with the ball, or offloading the short pass was often on, Cork didn’t look for those options.
In the end, it killed their chances. In that second half, Cork played 21 long balls into their attack and won just four.
Cork’s dearth of possession up front was also highlighted in the statistic of Galway creating 45 scoring chances to Cork’s 29.
In a final analysis, Jimmy Barry-Murphy and his management have done fantastic work to get the team as far as they did this season.
Yet the one key question before Sunday was how long more could a team with a largely non-aggressive mindset survive in the championship?  Was it naive for Barry-Murphy to think that Cork could contest, or win, another All-Ireland playing ‘the beautiful game’? Playing a more physical style is not their normal game.
Yet Galway had already shown against Kilkenny, the importance of physical power in order to build the platform to outgun teams like Kilkenny.
Cork don’t have the upper body strength at this stage of their development to engage or compete with a lot of teams in the tackle or the contact zone.
Playing a physical and aggressive game is not in their make-up but Cork had no need to get totally hung up on that either.
They had class ball-players and having the bottle to go for a score from a difficult angle, when no other option is available, fits the description of an aggressive mindset.
So is the ability to drive on when the pressure is greatest. Cork’s surge in the last quarter against Waterford – when they hit the last six points — was all the more impressive when compared to the last quarters of their championship matches last summer against Tipp, Offaly and Galway.
All three games were alive with 15 minutes remaining but Cork were outscored 3-16 to 0-6 in those 45 minutes.
Aggression can be defined in different forms but Cork will learn from this season that they need to marry the physical requirements more with the quality of their stick-work.
The excellent coaching and physical training of Ger Cunningham and David Matthews will bring that to bear in time. The young players will also mature.
Sunday was a big disappointment but this year showed that the foundations are now in place to build a far stronger challenge in the future.