Every team has a relief puckout for when pressure builds. A comfort blanket from their data set. When Tipperary scored the first four points of the second half in the All-Ireland final last July, Patrick Collins launched a restart into Brian Hayes’s air space at the top of the opposite D; when Tipp scored a penalty 11 minutes later, he did the same thing. Both times Ronan Maher fielded the dropping ball, clean, like somebody had tossed him an apple. Hayes’s two possessions in the second half were separated by 21 minutes. With the second one he was fouled for Cork’s penalty, by which time the scoreboard had blown a fuse. “That’s the first time he got away from Ronan Maher all day in the air,” said Michael Duignan in the RTÉ commentary.Hayes went into the All-Ireland final as favourite for Hurler of the Year; by the end of the game Maher had joined him on the shortlist, as if reputational capital had just been transferred from one account to the other. That evening on The Sunday Game, the Tipperary captain was named Man of the Match.One of the truisms of sport is that every team wins together and loses together, but on a day like that every annihilation was personal. The only place for those players to start again was from Ground Zero.“It’s something that you have to carry with you [the All-Ireland final defeat],” said Hayes on Second Captains last November. “You reflect on it for a while and it’s only when you go back into the Cork set-up that you’ll think about it a little bit more.”That has been done. Not all of the Cork players have recovered the form they showed before the sky went dark, though many of them have. And Hayes? There is an argument that he is even better now.Hayes is a finisher and a playmaker and a processing plant for primary ball, which means his scoring tallies are a crude measurement of his influence. By that metric there is no difference from this time last year: he had racked up 3-6 after four games in the 2025 championship and he has 1-12 to his name now.But at times this year his all-court game has been irresistible. Against Clare, in the first half alone, Hayes’s 10 possessions led to 1-5; against Waterford, four different players took turns as his marker, but he still scored seven points and made another two.Waterford's Paddy Leavy in action against Cork's Brian Hayes in the 2026 Munster GAA hurling championship. Photograph: INPHO “We couldn’t get the better of him,” says Donal O’Rourke, who was the Waterford coach this year, but had spent three years in that role with Pat Ryan in Cork. “You were saying to yourself, all the work you had put into this fella and he goes out and kills you then [laughs].”The turbine of Hayes’s career has been improvement: intentional, steady, relentless, dramatic, in that order. He had no other way of getting here. He wasn’t a child star, he didn’t play minor for Cork, nobody saw him coming. “He was a good young player,” says Seán McCarthy, who was chairman of St Finbarr’s juvenile section, and a selector when they won the senior county four years ago, “but you wouldn’t have thought he was going be the player he is now.”[ Cork are 100% All-Ireland contenders again this year, says Patrick HorganOpens in new window ]When he was invited on to the Cork senior panel for the 2023 season, he was a project player. Pat Ryan needed to trust in something that wasn’t visible to the naked eye.“His hurling was off [when he came in first],” says O’Rourke. “For the level he was playing at, it was that bit off. But he was always on to me: ‘How can I get better here?’ He wanted to get the best out of himself. He was very driven.”For Hayes, it is hard to countenance now the risk he took. A year earlier he had made a breakthrough with the Cork senior footballers and around that time everyone could see he was better at that game. His father Paddy had won football All-Irelands with Cork under Billy Morgan, and until his mid-teens, Brian’s preference was for football.At under-20 level he blossomed into a dual Cork player for two years, but in one of those seasons he was an impact sub for the hurlers. In the football group, he had a different status. “The thought of it at the time,” said Hayes years later, “was that I was going back to the bottom of the ladder [with the senior hurlers].”Cork’s Brian Hayes celebrates beating Dublin in 2025 All-Ireland semi-final. Photograph: