JOHN GARDINER has highlighted two key components in the Cork team heading into Sunday’s Munster hurling final against Waterford; Séan Óg and Aisake – also known as the Ó hÁilpín brothers. Being another of those key components himself, and their clubmates at Na Piarsaigh, Gardiner knows what he’s talking about.

Just a few weeks back, there was talk of Séan Óg being over-the-hill, and Aisake being over-rated – but the performance of both in the quarter-final win over Tipperary dismissed all that with a bang. Now, having comfortably handled Limerick in the semi-final, it’s time to raise their game again. Gardiner is expecting nothing less.

“With Séan Óg you know what you are going to get,” he says. “People had been criticising Séan Óg, and its laughable, really, because of the career that that man has had. He’s probably been the most consistent player of all time, I’d say. He’ll keep bouncing back. He’s one of the fellas that we depend on and he’s going to be that again in the Munster final. No doubt about it.

“Aisake was out of hurling for a long time and he is another guy who got a lot of criticism. Although he’s not as young as other fellas, he is developing. He’s not fully there. I don’t think he has reached his potential yet. He’s an option for us and is a luxury we didn’t have a few years ago. He’s not our only option and everyone is aware of that.

“He’s a great character to have around the place. I like to see him play well because he brings a good buzz about the place.

“He’s like all the Ó hÁilpíns really. I saw him in 2004 when he played club championship for us, and if he hadn’t gone to Australia that year he would probably have made the breakthrough. He wasn’t hurling for a couple of years. He was criticised after the league final and it was unfair for a lad who had been out for so long. It’s great for his confidence as well and hopefully he can go again.”

It’s already been an eventful Munster championship for Cork; hammering Tipperary when no one expected it; and not quite hammering Limerick when everyone expected it. Gardiner, as solid and consistent as ever, has seen nothing but positives, but knows, too, Waterford present a different sort of challenge again.

“The performance against Limerick wasn’t great,” he admits, “and we have a lot of things to work on. It was a different game to what we have been used to, a lot of mistakes on both sides. It made for a scrappy game.

“When you win a Munster championship game by 13 points you have to be happy. From our point of view the main focus was on getting to the Munster final.

“Tipperary was a bigger test for us, coming back. It was the first year in a while that we had trained together from the start. From our point of view we knew that if we won that game we knew it would open up the summer for us and we had a good chance of getting to where we are now.”

Where they are now is facing off against a Waterford team they know well in Thurles. They’ve met nine times at Munster and All-Ireland level between 2002 and 2007, with four wins each and one draw. That’s a statistic that should be underlined on Sunday; when Cork play Waterford these days there’s either very little between them, or nothing at all.

“Their team has evolved a small bit, but on the other hand they have a huge amount of experience and they know how to win games,” says Gardiner.

“And the Waterford games are more open. It seems to be 15 fellas going hell-for-leather and tactics go out the window against Waterford.

“When we play Kilkenny they are in a certain way, we set up to counteract that.

“With Waterford, you don’t know what way they are going to come out.”