ALL-IRELAND SFC FINAL:FOR CONOR Counihan, All-Ireland press nights have had a constant, defensive tone. Not so much for him because he's genial and courteous in what he has to say, seldom letting anything slip or betraying any inclinations towards a dark night of the soul.

The defensiveness, which might be said to suit him from his days as an uncompromising centre back, arises because there are always questions about Cork. Last year before the final when the team was sweeping all before them it was, “how do you handle the big day when you never seem able to beat Kerry in Croke Park?”

Counihan and his team say that they don’t even think about Kerry not being there but, 12 months after another defeat, they’re probably glad they no longer have to answer the perennial question about the difference between playing their neighbours in Munster and playing them in Dublin.

Kerry have bitten the dust so the question has changed. The team isn’t going that well. Why’s that?

“We certainly came through last year playing good, open football and people admired us. But eventually they’re going to say, ‘look we can’t allow them to do that’ and put numbers behind the ball and defended quite well against us.

“The flip side is that we’ve defended quite well ourselves and probably haven’t conceded as much. It’s been different in terms of being more patient and trying to break teams down.”

Defeat by Kerry still came this year in the provincial semi-final. Just as in the past Kerry replotted their seasons after setbacks in Munster, so Cork had to do the same thing last June.

“We probably lost a game that was quite closely contested that we could have won. We would have been disappointed in terms of our scoring in both of those games. We worked on that and probably did a bit better in the next two games but went back a bit in the last two – we could have been scoring a bit more.

“It’s just small things, it’s about patience and composure and confidence and hopefully that bit of steel. When the going got tough against Dublin we were able to hang in there.”

If last year’s promise was built on the dynamic power-plays that dismantled Tyrone, this season’s comes down to the ability to win ugly, to surf a disappointing display and still catch a wave at the very end.

“It’s not easy to play against the type of intensity that Dublin had. We were going in as favourites, they had all the motivation and they played very well. They probably played that game as well as most teams I have seen this year. They asked us a lot of questions and we were fortunate enough to come out on the right side of it.”

He takes issue with the depiction of a systems malfunction that has seen the younger players he introduced to freshen the team and distance it from Kerry-induced trauma lose form and have to be replaced by veterans.

“The last day against Dublin guys like Paddy Kelly and Paul Kerrigan stood up quite well and we bring in older players at different stages to give us a bit more maturity. There are times when you need to change the balance and have to make those calls and hopefully you make the right ones.”

Now Cork face a hint of menace from the unknown. Down have materialised if not quite from nowhere then at least from reasonably far down the field. They dismissed Kerry at Croke Park with the type of bravura self-confidence that Cork must have dreamed of over the past five years.

So they appear again, the latest generation of self-assured, forward-driven teams. Down still have to lose a final: five out of five . . . but Counihan is ready to turn it back on the opposition.

“It’s only a stat but have they beaten Cork in any of them? I don’t think so, not yet anyway. . . these records are there to be broken. You wouldn’t like to be carrying that record on your back maybe as potentially the first team to fall – so it can be a plus or a minus depending on what way you take it. It’s about winning an All-Ireland. We can’t control who comes from the other side. It’s now up to us to perform on the day.”

Conor Counihan

Club: Aghada

Born: 1959

Appointed manager: 2008

Managerial honours: Munster SFC 2008 '09, NFL Division Two 2009, Division One 2010.

Player honours: All-Ireland U21 1980, NFL 1989, All-Ireland SFC 1989 '90, All Star 1989 '90.

Selectors: Peadar Healy, Terry O'Neill, Ger O'Sullivan, Jim Nolan.